Golden Horse Award-Winning Film Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
The Golden Horse Award-winning film 'Alifu, the Prince/ss' was shot with Blackmagic Design's URSA Mini 4.6K digital film camera and graded by colorist Zoe Chang with DaVinci Resolve Studio.
Directed by Yu-lin Wang, lensed by DP Pan-yun Wang, and starring Utjung Tjakivalid, Yi-lan Chao, Pong Fong Wu, and Chu-seng Chen, 'Alifu, the Prince/ss' tells the story of 25-year-old hair stylist Alifu and his friends as he is torn between realizing his dream of becoming a woman and inheriting the chief position handed down by his father.
URSA Mini 4.6K Camera Used for Film
On a tight budget of only $250,000 USD for the whole project, director Yu-lin Wang needed a digital film camera that was affordable but still capable of providing high-end footage. As a longtime user of Blackmagic Design's cameras, Wang was confident in their image quality and decided to use the URSA Mini 4.6K camera for the film.
'In addition to the powerful features at a low cost, the URSA Mini 4.6K's size fits me perfectly, and it doesn't feel heavy when shoulder-mounted,' said Pan-yun Wang.
DaVinci Resolve Studio Used for Grading
Zoe Chang, a veteran Taiwanese colorist with twenty years of experience in DI for feature films, TVCs, documentaries, music videos, graded the film using DaVinci Resolve Studio and the DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel.
'I didn't want to go with a greenish look for the blacks as it would make the character's face look very dirty,' said Chang. 'Plus Alifu is a transgendered person and he is a stylist, a profession that produces beauty, so I wanted to help build the character, who is sensitive and sentimental, with carefully handled skin tone and rich colors.'
Color Grading Process
Chang explained how she handled the looks of the film: 'I produced three tones for the director to choose from. For the first one, the blacks inclined towards reddish brown and the areas in the midtone that had neutral colors were tinted with water blue, so the characters could stand out from the background.'
She continued to make further refinements depending on scenes and stories: 'For the scenes full of lust, I added more purple. For pub scenes, with the help of DaVinci Resolve Studio's Power Windows, I was able to increase the saturation for the colors of the lights in specific regions, so the image matched the intoxicating music.'
