Blackmagic Design has announced that production company Hazimation has used DaVinci Resolve Studio for editing, color grading, visual effects (VFX) and audio post-processing on the animated feature film «Rift».

The project started during the pandemic and was developed by a distributed team using Unreal Engine and DaVinci Resolve Studio to manage all aspects of production. The Rift trailer, due out later this year, will be screened at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival this year.

Created interactively, “Rift” relied on DaVinci Resolve Studio as its scheduling and timeline tool, instead of the usual storyboards usually associated with animation. “The process was incredibly flexible,” begins director and producer Hasraf (HaZ) Dulull. “Our production team is distributed and based entirely in the cloud, working with a completely new, unconventional approach.”

Created and rendered from Unreal Engine as a final EXR 4K pixel render, the edit was updated automatically every time a frame was updated, eliminating the need for compositing in an external package to create the final frames.

“We created the first pass of the characters so I could start working on the shots, and then the team did another pass later in the production when they could see what I was doing with the characters in the shots,” HaZ explains. “The whole process developed organically, without animatics; instead, the team just repeated the scenes until they achieved the desired result.”

Using DaVinci Resolve Studio as a base also meant faster audio integration. As director and editor, XaZ used the Fairlight sound library in conjunction with his sound collection to quickly map out the soundscape, bringing the editing to life. They will then be exported and delivered to the audio node group, eliminating the need for audio detection sessions or large Excel spreadsheets.

One of the most difficult aspects of production was finding the style; the film was not meant to look like a video game or fall into the “uncanny valley” of animated films. “Having modeled this in Resolve, we experimented with OpenFX plugins to find and test the look before building shaders in Unreal Engine.”

A mega-grant from Epic allowed HaZ and his team to create their own anime-style shaders, as well as a number of tools and widgets designed by head of CGI Andrea Tedeschi that gave HaZ control over every element of the frame.

During one session together, the team realized that with all the different scenes and branching narratives being created, they were effectively laying the groundwork for a video game, and they jumped at the opportunity. The game is currently being developed concurrently and an early access demo will be available on Steam in June.

“The node-based approach used in the Fusion page is very similar to the system we use for the game, so the architecture of the Resolve tools helped speed up the process in unexpected ways,” concludes HaZ. “The fact that both Resolve and Unreal Engine are free, and that you can create an entire feature this way, is groundbreaking and incredibly inspiring for a new generation of filmmakers.”

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