Curse of the Sin Eater is a cautionary tale about being careful what you wish for. "The grass isn’t always greener,” warns director Justin Denton.
Just in time for Halloween, his new horror film follows the cruel fate of a poor construction worker, who makes a deal with a dying billionaire to inherit his fortunes, only to discover that he’s also been cursed with his sins. The film stars Carter Shimp, Elizabeth Laidlaw, Marcelo Wright and Larry Yando.
Denton was joined by a filmmaking team that included DP Robert Patrick Stern, editor Valerian Zamel and colorist Ryan Croft of Periscope, who used Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve Studio and Blackmagic Cloud as an end-to-end post solution across editing, grading and visual effects. For the film’s horror-filled twists and turns, the team was tasked with creating dream sequences for the main character’s nightmarish journey.
“The film’s dream sequences are in a space called ‘The Black,’ which is a smokey void,” explains Denton. “We had to test four different camera systems to see which one worked best with the dense fog. We ultimately selected a Pocket Cinema Camera 6K because its color science allowed it to maintain color information, whereas the other cameras’ LOG recordings all lost the color information in the dense fog.”
DP Stern adds, “The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K had an insane way of cutting through the fog that we were pushing into the tight space. The combination of the light camera body with a wide-angle lens allowed us to experiment with our movements around the character and see enough detail to hold the wild, dreamy feel we were after at the climax of our film.”
With both Denton and Croft coming from the VFX world, they were able to collaborate to further develop the vaporous dream sequences in post.
“Ryan developed a beautiful treatment for the dream scenes while grading,” explains Denton. “That’s actually one of the things I love most about Resolve. A lot of VFX can be done directly in the Fusion, color or edit pages, which really allowed us to collaborate while using Blackmagic Cloud to work in the same project.”
“The dream sequences were definitely the most challenging and exploratory part of the grading process,” Croft explains. “Since the film was edited in Resolve, I was able to first mimic the temp effects, which consisted of zoom blurs, tilt shift OFX and flickers, and start to iterate and develop from there. We started out going down the route of distortions, playing with stretching the edges of the image, but it felt too distracting. We wanted something that still had the intensity, but not feel as gimmicky. So, after auditioning many different ideas, off-hand in one of our sessions, I placed on a power grade I had made a while back for a different project. It mimicked lens whacking and added these beautiful random aberrations, light leaks and blurs, and we all kind of fell in love with it. It gave a horrifying feel, but also had a beauty to it."
Colorist Ryan Croft
Using this as the base, Croft began to reconfigure the power grade.
"We wanted to art direct the sequence, so I had to rebuild the effect from the ground up so we’d be able to adjust on the fly during sessions," he explains. "The final effect was a compound node tree that consisted of roughly 25 nodes, split into two branches: the light leaks and the blurs. The crux of the effect was driven by the fast noise OFX, auto animating, piping that alpha to a flicker addition for another layer of randomization and intensity, and using that to matte out various parts of each branch. The light leaks were created with the lens reflection OFX, so the leaks were reactive to the image being fed in, output as reflection alone, fed to a transform moving it to the sides of the frame and another flicker addition OFX, over to a custom mixer to marry it with the blur branch, which was three tilt shift OFXs being mapped from the source of the second input, which again were different noise patterns. Once the two branches were mixed, the final parts were a halation OFX, a camera shake to give a subtle alive lens whack movement, and a final set of noise generators with circular power windows to hit just the edges, fed to a simple corrector node that let me add an extra layer of leaks and extra colors to the overall effect.”
Editor Valerian Zamel
Without these tools, the team wouldn't have been able to deliver a film of this level, Denton explains.
"The Pocket Cinema Camera 6K gave us the perfect small form factor to create the floaty effect in a nightmarish space that other cameras couldn’t," notes the director. "We always wanted our dream space to be dense with fog, and we were surprised by how hard it was for more expensive cameras to capture that fog while also maintaining color information. Additionally, the Pocket Cinema Camera’s color science plays very well in Resolve, and the workflow was effortless with Blackmagic RAW. This allowed us to extract the most color possible out of our foggy dream sequences – even if some might consider them to be a nightmare.”