International. A frequent theme in production over the past few years has been drones, drones and more drones. And when it comes to hyper-realistic air chases, the best ones are created in Corridor Digital.
Known on YouTube for the spectacular magic of their visual effects, creators and filmmakers Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski use every possible element to get the perfect shot, including 3-D printed drones and hand-painted racing drones depicting Star Wars ships flying over a national forest.
Observing his work is quite a journey.
Filmed using the classic style of Star Wars space battles, its popular YouTube hit, "Drone Star Wars," is an aerial battle between the Empire and rebels in the style of Corridor Digital. Sam and Niko's use of drones has so far garnered more than 1.5 million views, and it's easy to see why. It's like putting on a VR headset, adjusting your seat belt, and taking off on a drone heading to infinity.
For "Drone Star Wars," the Corridor Digital team wanted to give the material an unreal feel, like that of a classic sci-fi movie (say, say, say, For example, Star Wars!), which involved incorporating vibrant, saturated colors that jump out at you. Because the material was shot with a pair of drones, Corridor Digital had to be careful to maintain the realistic look of the hunt. Therefore, the color grading process was vital, and unlike most YouTube videos, Corridor worked with a full range of tools to make an unforgettable aerial battle. They chose Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve to accentuate the colors, without losing the quality of the material.
"Resolve makes it easy for us to convert a normal scene by extending its quality to a high cinematic level," says Niko. "We really tried to make them more than just drone footage, and with Resolve it was easy to adjust the colors to bring the film to life. It is an excellent tool to highlight colors, their specific tones and nuances. For example, we managed to select all the green vegetation, which seemed a little worn, and make it explode with a much more intense blue green. Those colors are not obtained in a forest environment on our planet, so the ability to create them in post-production is crucial."
In fact, Niko's favorite stage during post-production is the color adjustment, and after all the efforts of Corridor Digital to ensure a perfect shooting of the drones, it was important to transform the flat background of the forest to get the full effect.
"DaVinci Resolve really allowed us to achieve the classic sci-fi look we were looking for," says Niko. "We also wanted to give the rock formations a color that mimicked the desert. We wanted people to feel like they would on another planet. With Resolve, we were able to isolate the cinnamon tones from the rocks and push them in a stronger, more saturated direction that showed two levels of tone for the earth. The deep blues and silvery whites of the sky, as well as other parts of the landscape, kept their color, while we converted other areas to a more powerful version of orange."
The ability to give the material the full treatment in post-production took his work beyond the common material that appears in most drone films. A look at the cinematic quality of "Drone Star Wars" and it is hard to believe that they are images filmed on small remote control drones. The look of the film is like for a movie screen. And it is not only optimal to see it on the big screen; it can be seen perfectly on every type of screen imaginable.
"When producing a high-quality video like this for YouTube, it's very important to keep in mind that people will be watching it on screens of different sizes, whether it's on a mobile device, tablet, laptop, etc.," Niko emphasizes. "Overall, it's good to sharpen the focus a bit, especially for drone imaging, and DaVinci Resolve has the tools to do that. We use a different kind of tool to sharpen focus with a larger radius, so it still looks great on a small phone screen. With Resolve, we can fine-tune many features based on the platforms where they will be viewed."
Corridor Digital's talented team is always aware of what their audience is watching and what they want to see, and "Drone Star Wars" is no exception. YouTube is constantly showing new short films of great quality and tremendously captivating, which means that the demand for new material is quite large. Fortunately, DaVinci Resolve offers tools fast enough to keep up with the fast pace of adrenaline.
"Because Resolve works on the CPU, it's incredibly fast, and the tools are so well organized that you get very fast during the process," Niko says. "Their mask tracking capabilities are fantastic, and the whole system of nodes, mixing keys and color features are cool."
He continues: "We also do a lot of work with LUTs, fast and surprising, which makes the creation of nodular structures and their jump to LUTs, in addition to their subsequent disconnection of nodes, intuitive and maintain the same chromatic fidelity. It's very useful to reanalyze previous color gradations, which we often do, to look at what new materials look like when using parameters from the past."
At the end of the day (or filming), Niko is more than ready to sit down and immediately start color grading. "Resolve has the tools we need to get the look and feel of high-end cinema. This was impossible until a few years ago, and I'm excited about the potential of my images every time I sit down to do the gradation."
Making a first-class YouTube video requires a little extra attention during post-production. Even the most ordinary image can be transformed into extraordinary with the right tools, and with a pair of hand-painted Star Wars drones. Check out "Drone Star Wars" to witness the magic.
Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZLrs9gX73M
About filming: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhR4QEEa5dw
