Writing With Fire, nominated for this year’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar, completed postproduction using Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve Studio editing, color grading, visual effects (VFX) and audio postproduction software and DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panels. This included color correction, online editing and managing the films’ various delivery needs.
Directed by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, Writing With Fire tells the story of Khabar Lahariya, India’s only newspaper run by Dalit women. The film shows how, in a cluttered news landscape dominated by men, Khabar Lahariya’s chief reporter and her two fellow journalists broke traditions and redefined what it means to be powerful.
Mumbai-based Bridge PostWorks provided postproduction for the film. Industry vet Sidharth Meer graded and provided online editing and conforming.
The film was primarily shot over four years in Uttar Pradesh, an Indian region that has extreme climates and incredibly colorful paints for the interior and exterior of homes. Shots for the film were a mix of talking head interviews and footage of the three reporters in action. DaVinci Resolve Studio was able to adjust each shot to maintain a look that focused on the subjects and not the intense color and lighting of the backgrounds.
Beyond color correction, Meer relied heavily on DaVinci Resolve Studio’s editing and delivery tools. The film had a lot of conform work, which included instances of super imposed titles and graphics, separate looks for material that had originated on smartphones, and clips that had to look like webpages from YouTube with video playing within them, which had their own subtitles.
Writing With Fire was shown in theaters and at dozens of online film festivals, on top of having to be delivered to the Motion Picture Academy for Oscar consideration. Resolve accommodated delivery of all these versions.
