The Real Robin Hood Revealed With DaVinci Resolve

For a proper retelling of the legend of Robin Hood, it was never going to be merry! A lifetime of hardship, war in the Crusades and oppression certainly doesn't equal that type of story. Legend tells that Robin Hood was a hardened archer and brutal soldier. He and his handpicked band of mercenaries were part of a tough, cruel and lethal time in British history. 

Director Ridley Scott couldn't change Hollywood's previous takes on the band of "merry men," but he would cast his new movie in the proper sense… creating a tough and brutal world that was the 13th century. That's just what he did in Universal Pictures' epic action-adventure Robin Hood, starring Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, directed by Ridley Scott and produced by Oscar winner Brian Grazer.
Scott had a very specific vision in mind for the look of Robin Hood. He needed a classic grim, English look and feel and he wanted the battle scenes to have a powerful intensity. Scott took the film to Santa Monica-based Company 3 and colourist Stephen Nakamura to help him establish the desired look during the DI colouring process.
Nakamura is one of Hollywood's most experienced colour artists and has worked on a number of top films, including the James Bond thriller Quantum of Solace, Spiderman 3 and important indies such as the Davis Guggenheim documentary Waiting For Superman. Nakamura did all his work on Robin Hood using the Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve and DaVinci 2K systems running on Linux systems.
He commented: "The Resolve gave us the power and feature set that we needed to meet Ridley's vision. [He] was looking for an overcast, Old English feel for the movie and that would only work if every shot maintained that vision. It went beyond just the weather and every item in the movie had to fit into the vision of a gritty, realistic historical time period. This meant that every link in a suit of chain mail had to be fine tuned and every sword need to be sharpened and made to give it just a bit more of a menacing feel."
One of the first tasks Nakamura faced was the fact that the film was shot during a particularly sunny and rain-free time in England. Far from the rain-driven and mud splattered image that Ridley had, many of the shots looked extremely pleasant. Many of the shots also needed to be changed from day to night – a fairly serious task for a colourist when the actors were basking in the sunlight.
To make the adjustments, Nakamura developed a number of custom based chroma and luminance keys. This gave him the ability to easily jump from shot to shot and grade each one while reusing edits already made with previous keys.
Using the high performance and speeds of the Resolve system with the customer based keys, in conjunction with the Resolve's other real-time colour processing capabilities, which included PowerWindows for multilayered area isolations; Vector Plus for precise hue, saturation, and luminance qualifying and Custom Curves for independent adjustment of RGB, he was able to smoothly and quickly adjust each shot's background and environment.
Nakamura combined these with the Resolve's powerful colour trace tool. This allowed him to track colour grades as EDL's are revised (a common occurrence on a project the size of Robin Hood.)
He added: "I literally had to fix each and every shadow and turn day into night. This was beyond a simple colour correction task and it required a great deal of power and advanced workflow features. The Resolve's ability to let me quickly build as many chroma and luminance keys as needed, when combined with the colour trace feature is something that is unique to the system and really sets it apart."
He concluded: "Quite simply, the Resolve system is the only technology available that could have handled this task. The Resolve is the fastest system out there, and that speed let me grade in the unique ways required by Ridley."
(BMcN)