Blackmagic Design Case Study: Chinese Blockbuster 1950 Steel 7th Squadron and its Sequel

According to Blackmagic Design, China’s highest-grossing 1950 Steel 7th Squadron and its sequel 1950 The Floodbridge Showdown were created by a team of colorists led by Beijing Shangtian Film and Media’s Zhang Wei. It was graded using DaVinci Resolve Studio and DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel editing, grading, VFX and audio post production software.

Co-directed and co-produced by Chen Kaige, Tsui Hark, and Dante Lam, “1950 Steel 7th Squadron,” starring Wu Jing and Yi Yangchengshi, is set during the Korean War. , the story of the Chinese People’s Volunteers who fought against the US forces at Changjin Lake. The sequel depicts the assault of Chinese Volunteers on the Watergate Bridge, a key bridge on the American retreat route.

Prior to these two films, Zhang has used DaVinci Resolve Studio to grade many popular Chinese films. “Hakko”, “Kukai-KU-KAI-The Mystery of the Beautiful Queen”, “I am a Great Detective of Chinatown 3”, “Hidden Man (English Title)”, “Fiery Hero ~A Story for Warriors~”, An example of this is “My Beloved Motherland”.

The grading of “1950 Steel 7th Company” was a race against time. Filming for the film was completed in May 2021, although the film was originally scheduled for release in August 2021.

Mr. Zhang commented:

Mr. Zhang: As it was the final stage of post production, the colorists had even less time left. Also, 1950 Steel 7th Squadron was a multi-director production, filmed by different teams using a variety of cameras. Therefore, the biggest challenge was to create a cohesive look within tight time limits while meeting the demands of each director.

DaVinci Resolve Studio’s collaboration capabilities were critical to getting all the work done on a tight schedule. Since multiple artists can work on the same timeline at the same time, work efficiency has improved significantly. For example, a colorist can work with a director on color correction while an assistant fine-tunes an edit.

Mr. Zhang and his color correction team individually graded each director’s footage and went all out to ensure the directors were happy with the results. We then put all the shots together according to the story, making adjustments where necessary to match the colors of each scene.

In the sequel, director Tsui Hark did most of the work, which made it easier to unify the look. Rather, Mr. Zhang’s task was to achieve the details the director wanted to emphasize in each shot. For example, the nuances of acting and the pressure of the characters were emphasized using colors according to the director’s request.

Mr. Zhang: A good example of this would be the fight scene in the pump room. Director Haak stressed the impact of the fire in this scene, and that when the lights in the room were out, the scene had to be darkened to create a more atmospheric atmosphere.

DaVinci Resolve Studio’s HDR tools played an important role in these two films.

Mr. Zhang: After setting the color space of the timeline, I was able to use the HDR tool to precisely control specific zones, so I could control the density and color temperature of the sky in one node without affecting the ground or skin tones. could be adjusted. It saved me a lot of time because I didn’t have to create mattes for different areas.

We also had multiple versions of each VFX shot, so the clip color coding feature that allowed us to set clips to different colors was also helpful. This feature allows you to easily identify and manage different versions.

After support for HDR Vivid, an HDR video standard devised by the UWA Alliance, was added to DaVinci Resolve Studio 18, Zhang used DaVinci Resolve Studio to create 1950 Steel 7th Squadron and other blockbuster Chinese movies. I am creating an HDR Vivid version of a movie.