Writing With Fire, nominated for this year’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar, completed postproduction using Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve Studio editing, color grading, visual effects (VFX) and audio postproduction software and DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panels. This included color correction, online editing and managing the films’ various delivery needs.
Directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, Writing With Fire tells the story of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only newspaper run by Dalit women. The film shows how, in a cluttered news landscape dominated by men, Khabar Lahariya’s chief reporter and her two fellow journalists broke traditions and redefined what it means to be powerful.
Mumbai-based Bridge PostWorks provided postproduction for the film. Industry vet Sidharth Meer graded and provided online editing and conforming.
The film was primarily shot over four years in Uttar Pradesh, an Indian region that has extreme climates and incredibly colorful paints for the interior and exterior of homes. Shots for the film were a mix of talking head interviews and footage of the three reporters in action. DaVinci Resolve Studio was able to adjust each shot to maintain a look that focused on the subjects and not the intense color and lighting of the backgrounds.
Beyond color correction, Meer relied heavily on DaVinci Resolve Studio’s editing and delivery tools. The film had a lot of conform work, which included instances of super imposed titles and graphics, separate looks for material that had originated on smartphones, and clips that had to look like webpages from YouTube with video playing within them, which had their own subtitles.
Writing With Fire was shown in theaters and at dozens of online film festivals, on top of having to be delivered to the Motion Picture Academy for Oscar consideration. Resolve accommodated delivery of all these versions.
First-Time Feature Directors Make Major Splash At AFI Fest, Generate Oscar Buzz
Two first-time feature directors who are generating Oscar buzz this awards season were front and center this past weekend at AFI Fest in Hollywood. Rachel Morrison, who made history as the first woman nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar---on the strength of Mudbound in 2018--brought her feature directorial debut, The Fire Inside (Amazon MGM Studios), to the festival on Sunday (10/27), and shared insights into the film during a conversation session immediately following the screening. This came a day after William Goldenberg, an Oscar-winning editor for Argo in 2013, had his initial foray into feature directing, Unstoppable (Amazon MGM Studios), showcased at the AFI proceedings. He too spoke after the screening during a panel discussion. The Fire Inside--which made its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival--tells the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (portrayed by Ryan Destiny), a Black boxer from Flint, Mich., who trained to become the first woman in U.S. history to win an Olympic Gold Medal in the sport. She achieved this feat--with the help of coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry)--only to find that her victory at the Summer Games came with relatively little fanfare and no endorsement deals. So much for the hope that the historic accomplishment would be a ticket out of socioeconomic purgatory for Shields and her family. It seemed like yet another setback in a cycle of adversity throughout Shields’ life but she persevered, going on to win her second Gold Medal at the next Olympics and becoming a champion for gender equality and equitable pay for women in sports. Shields has served as a source of inspiration for woman athletes worldwide--as well as to the community of... Read More