New Zealand Sons Film’s new film, “Zombie Repellent,” was completed with DaVinci Resolve Studio, Blackmagic Cloud and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 digital cinema cameras. As part of the post production process, the filmmakers also used a number of DaVinci Resolve Neural Engine AI tools, including Face Refinement and UltraNR noise reduction.
“Zombie Repellent” is a mix of horror and romantic comedy and stars Chad Malen and Olivia Rose. The film from Sean and Taylor King, the father and son founders of New Zealand Son Films, will soon be available in theatres and for streaming.
Together the two filmmakers have written, directed and produced all of the company’s 19 films, which can be seen in 160 countries on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Tubi, Flix, Plex and 16 other platforms.
The film’s director and DP, Taylor King, shot anamorphic using Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 over three weeks. The film was shot using a Laowa 35mm Nanomorph Anamorphic 1.5x lens in conjunction with the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2.
DaVinci Resolve Studio was used throughout the entire production, starting in pre production with LUT development right on set.
Blackmagic Cloud become an integral part of their filmmaking process, allowing them to work more efficiently and with artists they trust anywhere in the world. Editing was done in Chicago with sound and colour correction done by artists in other parts of the United States using DaVinci Resolve Studio.
Sean explained: “At the end of each shoot day, we created a timeline with production audio and BRAW video. Resolve instantly started creating proxies in the background and uploading them to the Cloud along with the production audio, and the colourist and audio editor would start getting footage they could work with in minutes. Usually within two hours the entire days footage had been downloaded and available to all our workstations.”
He continued: “We can be collaborating with a composer, colourist or sound designer anywhere in the world and they can watch the dailies immediately. And then as sound design and colour correction are being done in Resolve in different states, those changes are being updated instantly and downloaded to anyone who opens the session. It’s been a game changer.”
Another set of DaVinci Resolve Studio tools that were essential to the creation of “Zombie Repellent” were several of the software’s Neural Engine AI tools, including Face Refinement Filter, UltraNR noise reduction, Film Look Creator and Voice Isolation.
“DaVinci Resolve’s AI tools are exactly what AI should be. Designed to help give me more time to be creative and not take over creating, or worse, steal what we work so hard to create,” Sean explained. “UltraNR has really helped since ‘Zombie Repellant’ takes place at night and we pushed the camera to the edge of it’s low light ability. Face Refinement let us fix hot spots on actors faces and minor make up changes. And funny enough, on the zombies, we used it in reverse to give them a more menacing look.”
He continued: “The Neural Engine feature we used on every shot is the Voice Isolation. Even at very low settings, it can remove enough of the background without any artifacts, and at higher settings save audio that would have been unusable a few years ago.”
As filmmakers that have a history of shooting in widely different genres, New Zealand Sons have come to rely on DaVinci Resolve Studio to help them stay efficient.
Sean explained: “One of the major breakthroughs for us and using Resolve happened a couple years ago when we discovered Resolve’s color management workflow. It gives us unlimited possibilities for the varying looks of the different projects. And in the last year, the addition of the new Colour Slicer and Film Look features have allowed us to move from genre to genre in the same color management pipeline and node tree, creating unlimited looks, without changing our normal colour correction workflow.”
“What I’ve learned from working with Resolve over the last five years is it’s a constantly evolving software, with new tools and features released every few months. I search YouTube weekly looking for colourist advice and tutorials to keep on top of the new additions, and use that shared knowledge to incorporated into my workflow,” he finished