ONTARIO—Back in 2021, suffering from severe pandemic-related cabin fever, I decided to do something I’d never done before: make and release some ultra-short horror movies entirely online.
And so, with a tiny self-funded budget, a lot of goodwill and plenty of favors, we managed to shoot six short horror movies in six days with a crew of only 12 people. “Creepy Bits” was born as a web series and released into the world on YouTube—one at a time—in the lead-up to Halloween 2021.
All Together Now
Without the usual budget to pay people to do it all for us, we had to figure out a good workflow to manage postproduction. In the end, DP Gregory Bennett and I chose to use DaVinci Resolve Studio because we both already owned the studio license, and Resolve had recently added editing to its mix of capabilities. Since we were going to use DaVinci Resolve for color grading anyway, we thought it would be easier for us to do all post-production in the application.
“Creepy Bits” season one ended up having a very successful festival run playing at 17 international festivals, garnering 24 award nominations, five wins and two distribution deals. It did well enough for us to get the interest of LaRue Entertainment in making another season, but this time with 15 times the budget and five times the run time.
Unlike season one, this time we’d have a lot more data and five editors to work with, so after thoroughly researching workflows, we ended up choosing DaVinci Resolve Studio again largely because of the new cloud features.
“Creepy Bits” season two was shot in May 2024 with two Alexa LF cameras in ProRes 4444XQ and in 4.5K open gate. We created two identical 32-Terabyte RAIDs and filled up about 22 TB of them with the footage from the show. Our DMT, Mollie Milchberg, not only ensured all the camera cards were copied properly, but she also created new Blackmagic Cloud projects for each episode, ingested, audio synced, relabeled all the footage and then created an assembly edit timeline from the script supervisor’s logs.
Cloud Collaboration
By the time we had finished filming, we had two full backups and a Resolve project ready to be edited. Each of the five editors went home with HD proxies they could work from for editing, and all they had to do was log into their Blackmagic Cloud account, open their episode, and relink their proxies.
Gregory and I kept the two RAIDs with the masters (the editors worked off proxies), and all the projects were stored in the cloud. This enabled the entire post team of about 15 different people to work off the same cloud library (with working files on local drives) and saved us piles of time and money from not having to constantly courier hard drives around. And at any point, I was able to pop into any episode and see where things were at in real time with zero confusion about which version to look at.
When it came to color correction, Gregory was able to do a first pass from his copies of the masters at his studio, and when we were ready for the online, we did it together at mine.
The combination of Resolve’s world-class color grading, competent NLE, integrated media transcoding, and the new cloud-based workflow proved to be an excellent choice and enabled us to finish VFX-heavy post on 105 minutes of new content in just under four months, with a comparatively small team and tight budget.
More information is available at www.blackmagicdesign.com.
