Mark Ma recently used the Baselight TWO grading system to grade Jackie Chan’s latest film, Police Story 2013, at China Film Group.
This article was recently published in Film Makers Guide. Here is a short extract in English; click the link below to view the full article in Chinese.
China Film Group is a large-scale group that provides best in class services. The colour grading room looks like a small theatre and colourist, Mark Ma, has graded a lot of films there. Mark recently graded Jackie Chan’s latest film, Police Story 2013.
“Colour grading is an important part of the whole film project,” Mark said. “The colour of the film influences the film style and the psychology of the audience.”
China Film Group relishes the cutting edge technology that has appeared in the past 10 years, during which time digital film technology has changed monumentally. Mark chose the Baselight TWO colour grading system from FilmLight for this project.
“This is the first time I’ve used Baselight and it’s terrific, marvellous.
“As a colourist, I need to keep up-to-date with the latest technology—know the latest cameras, formats, 3D technology,” he added. “Police Story 2013 is a challenging project with more than 3600 shots. There was never enough time to start with, plus it’s 3D so we needed to complete the 2D and 3D jobs on the same platform. That’s why we used Baselight.
“The colourist needs to have good communication with directors and DoPs to be able to express their thoughts and feelings with colour,” Mark said. “At first, I was worried because I’ve not used the system before, but Baselight is so intuitive. The grading tools are excellent and it’s very comfortable to work with. It has a clear user interface and every key on the control panel has a dynamically displayed label that can be customised. This improved my efficiency so much and made it very soothing to grade with. With Baselight, we saved one third of the time we expected to use, which also surprised the director, Ding Sheng.”
