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those frames in and manage the whole shot together with all the elements...multiple ele- ments are going into the shot.When you are talking about bending: fire bending, earth bending, air bending, plus paint and creature work and all the compositing that goes into replacing the background, it gets pretty large very quickly.” “That was a very tricky challenge for them,” acknowledges Shyamalan.“To be able to stare at it for a long time and live with it as the dialogue is going on in the fore- ground, as the Steadicam keeps moving around the characters.” It’s an “unusual com- bination of CGI and a long sinewy shot.The combination makes it very balletic.” WORKFLOW ILM’s shot production workflow was en- hanced by a new pipeline pioneered on Harry Potter. It used Nvidia 4800 and 5800 graphics cards to create GPU-based render- farms. (See our sidebar on www.post- magazine.com) VFX sequences were sent between ILM VFX editor Tony Pitone and Buff and Ken- neally as consolidated Avid media. “Pitone would send VFX shot versions as AAFs.We keep all versions of all shots organized by cut reel and VFX sequence,” notes Kenneally. Airbender used Aspera for secure ex- changing of specification specific QuickTime files between the studio, composer James Newton Howard and Skywalker Sound, as well as Efilm for DI file exchanges. “Aspera was also used to receive digital dailies of aerial plate photography that was shot, de- veloped and processed in New Zealand by Park Road Post,” says Kenneally. “We up- loaded everything MOS for security pur- poses, then all audio files were uploaded to another SFTP PIX System.” CineSync was used to manage VFX re- view sessions between ILM and Blinding Edge. ILM and Shyamalan could simultane- ously watch synced playback and annotate right on individual shots.“I would have the AAFs already cut into the editor’s Avid reels,” explains Kenneally.“This allowed Con- rad and Night to work on the shots and ma- nipulate the cut in regard to the progress of the VFX shots right away.” “One thing I like to do on a show that has a lot of VFX,” continues Kenneally,“is to treat the VFX house just as I would the sound or music department.When the editor and di- rector turn over a reel for music and sound, I would also turn over the entire reel MOS as consolidated media to the VFX vendor.This way, everybody is on the same page. It makes it easier for VFX and picture editorial to track and communicate.VFX also gets to see how the VFX shots are evolving in the cut.” “Working with visual effects, you are edit- ing two times,” says Shyamalan.“You are edit- ing the performances and you are guessing about everything else because it’s not there. Once you get all the visual effects, which hap- pens so late in the game, [you think],‘Oh, it’s telling me too much. I don’t need to hang on this scene so long.’You edit the movie all over again. So that was a new process for me.” Shyamalan says the TV show is targeted at younger viewers and this film “got older with every iteration. “It’s still a youthful movie, no question” but it is “less youthful, less puckish.” Looking back over the experi- ence, Shyamalan says, “It’s really healthy for an artist to go out of their sweet spot and learn new chops, and in retrospect that’s what happened.” Carole Kenneally: “One thing I like to do on a show that has a lot of VFX is to treat the VFX house just as I would the sound or music department.”