Blackmagic Design has announced that Malaysia’s colourist Beh Jing Qiang used DaVinci Resolve Studio to grade a new Coca-Cola commercial, which was also shot using Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 4.6K G2 and Blackmagic RAW.
The Coca-Cola commercial for the Southeast Asia region takes a look at what people have been doing while they have been at home in 2020 and how Coca-Cola products have been a part of everyday life. After being shot in Malaysia by DP Sam Koay, it was color graded by Beh Jing Qiang, colorist, Blackmagic Design Certified Trainer and owner of a boutique post company, Film Troop Post.
Film Troop Post provides a wide range of post production services and in only a short amount of time has worked on a number of commercials, short films and music videos. This includes post on Netflix Malaysia’s “BahasaSini,” commercials for Panasonic, Huawei, Tiger Crystal beer, Pepsi, Wonda Coffee, Levi’s, A&W, Yonex, Subway and Hong Leong Bank Malaysia and the artist, Andi Bernadee’s latest music video, ‘Penat’.
Twenty six year old Beh Jing Qiang first started using DaVinci Resolve Studio as a college student and progressed to forming Film Troop Post, which has become one of the fastest growing post production company in Malaysia, and DaVinci Resolve Studio has been at the center of that growth.
“My partners Ee Kai Sheng, Patrick Chua and I have the same vision. This was to offer streamlined post production services, move forward with newer technologies, techniques and creative choices and to provide the best quality finishing. Resolve is our main colour grading software and is helping us to cater to more clients,” he said.
For the new spot, Coca-Cola’s creative group wanted to feature a number of Coca-Cola brand beverages being consumed in various at home situations. Beh Jing Qiang and Sam Koay were given the instruction to keep the look and feel of the spot warm, but to also feel free to explore different looks for each circumstance, as long as warmish tones were kept.
To meet his vision for how he wanted to bring out each segment of the commercial, Beh Jing Qiang used a number of different DaVinci Resolve Studio features in conjunction with high quality images given to him from the URSA Mini Pro 4.6K G2 and the Blackmagic RAW codec.
“There are a lot of URSA Mini and Pocket Cinema Camera owners in Malaysia and Blackmagic RAW is not a stranger to most of us colourists. The images captured were incredibly clean, had good dynamic range, offered a lot of flexibility, smooth playback and the colors that are captured pretty much inspire how the final outcome looks like,” he said. “One more thing that we like are the skin tones, which gels very well with the grade, and there is not much of skin tone qualifying that needs to be done.”
For the grade, Beh Jing Qiang used basic lift gamma gain to achieve the look in the spot he needed, along with DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Power Windows features to help shape the frames and relighting on the specific subjects in the shot.
He continued: “The real time power of Resolve was really evident throughout the whole grade. A great example is when I overheard a conversation between the producer and post producer about changing the color of a lid for one of the products. Before they decided to send it to the online department, I quickly used Resolve’s Qualifier and Power Window and some manual tracking to change the colour of the lid. The result was good, and it’s exactly what they needed.”
Part of the post production process was to prepare the commercial for distribution in different formats for the multiple South East Asia countries. To accomplish this, he used DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Remote Grading set of tools.
“Remote Grading is always my go to whenever it comes to different outputs for different countries, cut downs, etc. It makes my life so easy when I can just simply link the colour to the Blackmagic RAW footage whenever a new EDL/XML comes in. And even with new shots that are not graded from the master timeline, I can always grab a still from the similar shot and paste that grade over,” he continued.
“The first time I heard about Resolve was when one of my classmates installed the free version of Resolve 11 on our university’s iMac! Learning Davinci Resolve and color grading has opened so many doors for me, led me to many places, allows me to work with different artists in the industry. It also provides me my bread and butter and has helped me learn so much about the post production world, the art of colour, the technology, different cameras and their abilities, codecs and even teaching and sharing. It’s the one and only professional tool that is literally instantly available for everybody,” he finished.
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