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COVER STORY The Last Airbender H OLLYWOOD — The Last Airbender is M. Night Shyamalan’s epic, live- action retelling of the popular Nickelodeon animated television series cre- ated by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. Eager to see how his moviemak- ing style would express itself on a large scale, Shyamalan chose the story of a magi- cal young boy whom fate has chosen to save the world from an elemental war. That would be really phenomenal! We have the technology!” He says the inspiration was a really quick “organic moment.” “One of the reasons Night wanted me to do this film,” recalls Buff, who edited Shya- malan’s previous movie The Happening,” is that I’ve done a lot of films that have CGI vi- sual effects, and for him it was a unique expe- rience. Most of his films have none. I could bring something to help him in a unique way.” during shooting we would look at dailies every night. But I would frequently go up there [on set] during the day in anticipation of certain sequences that we were com- mitted to turn over.” From location to location, the day’s dailies were scanned and imported at DNxHD 36 and screened from Buff’s lap- top running Media Composer cabled to an Avid Mojo, then projected to a Christie HD3K in a mobile trailer. “I could play cut sequences for him,” Buff recalls, “on a relatively large screen just in the privacy of the trailer while he was hav- ing lunch.We could talk about them, make changes, adjustments.That really helped us advance the ball. It allowed us to commit to these things early and meet our deadlines for CGI.” At Blinding Edge Pictures, Shyamalan’s production facility in Conshohocken, PA, Jon Petersen, senior engineer at Pivotal Post, Los Angeles, set up four Avid Adrenalines on the second floor of a 19th Century horse barn. Each Avid was running Media Composer 3.1.3 on Mac Pro “HarperTowns” with a DNxcel board and JVC DTV24L1D 24-inch HDSDI viewing monitors connected to a 16TB Unity media share system. “This was my first time editing on the Avid in HD, which is wonderful,” says Buff. “Night always printed film until this time, and he likes to screen dailies.” According to visual effects and assistant editor Carole Kenneally, at the Blinding Edge digital theater,“They would screen cuts or the entire movie straight from the Avid Adrena- line via HDSDI to a Christie CP2000M 2K projector at 1920x1080.” Echoes Buff,“We could watch it at the drop of a hat and we could watch it in stereo or in 5.1 in HD and have a pretty close-to-finished experience.” ILM provided over 500 visual effects shots for The LastAirbender. Shot on 35mm in 2D, the film got its 3D conversion at Stereo D in Los Angeles. THE EDIT The movie was edited by Oscar-winner Conrad Buff (Titanic) and features some of the most complex visual effects ever pro- duced by the artists at Industrial Light & Magic.When asked why didn’t he make The Last Airbender an animated movie, Shya- malan enthusiastically replies, “When we watched the cartoon. I thought,‘Wow, I can make a great live-action movie out of this! “Conrad and I have done two movies together, [so] we have a kind of a short- hand,” says Shyamalan.“He knows me — what I like.” “Night had to commit to VFX sequences before he was even done shooting, which is not something he’s ever had to deal with,” says Buff.“We had to lock sequences to turn them over to ILM, because they liter- ally needed months to do their work. So THE VFX Using a previs created by Daniel Gregoire at Halon Entertainment, Shyamalan got a good preview of what some of the VFX would look like.“We did the majority of Act III,” says Gregoire, which contains some of the longest effects sequences in the movie. “We had complete guidance from Night,” he continues.The previs was heavily based on the “extensive storyboards” already cre- ated by Shyamalan and brainstorming meet- ings with cinematographer Andrew Leslie. The three of them would talk out ideas for www.postmagazine.com By NICHOLAS and DANIEL RESTUCCIO M. Night Shyamalan turns an animated TV show into a live- action film, and works with VFX for the first time. M. Night Shyamalan: “Working with visual effects, you are editing two times — you are editing the performances and you are guessing about everything else because it’s not there.” July 2010 • Post 15