Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1530454
www.postmagazine.com 20 POST NOV/DEC 2024 monkeys. [It] was like a really big learning curve. I tried my best to just use my heart as my beacon to cut these scenes as much as possible. What thrilled me emotionally? What made me cry? What made me laugh? What did I think was the requirement to cut a musical sequence? How did I do it differently with In the Heights or Tick, Tick...Boom!, and use all that skill set to tackle something this big." Kerstein has been working on Wicked, and its forthcoming sequel, for two years, much of the time in England at Sky Studios, where he had an edit suite set up just downstairs from The Wizard's Throne Room. "I would talk to Alice Brooks, the DP, every day," he recalls. "I would talk to Jon as much as I could, even though [he's] running around like a maniac try- ing to shoot two movies. I built a screening room to watch the dailies every day, just across the hallway. I just tried to cut as quickly as possible the 250 hours of dailies I got over eight months, and I did my best to answer questions for VFX, who needed stuff right away, or if second unit needed to pick-up stuff, to give them some guidance. I was in the trenches for sure with production the whole time." Kerstein had an Avid set-up with NEXIS storage on-site. He also had an Avid at his flat in London, and at him home in Los Angeles. The challenge of cutting Wicked came from its enormous number of visual effects, which would be added to his cut later in the process, as well as its numerous musical sequences. "Jon isn't a huge fan of previs," he notes. "He finds it helpful to sort of know where to put the camera, but for the most part, he likes to be pretty loose on the day." For the most part, the VFX team was waiting for him to create an initial cut from which they would gear the visual effects. "Then it's a mad rush for them," he says of the VFX process. "They don't have a lot of time. Even with 'Defying Gravity,' which, again, came in pretty late — Jon and I were creating shots pretty late in the process — these big wide shots of her flying." The choreographed musical sequences added to the editing challenge. "Jon likes to start and stop songs," notes the ed- itor. "He likes to stretch songs he likes. They're very malleable pieces of real estate." While Kerstein didn't always have final versions of the songs when working on the edit, he often had temp tracks with piano accompaniment, and even live vocals from the shoot. "I was having to talk [with] Wyatt Smith, who cut The Little Mermaid and Into the Woods," Kerstein recalls. "And he said it's twice the pain. And I agree with that because musicals are the hardest things you could ever cut, without a doubt. But then you have the VFX component of it, and trying to balance those two things. It's a lot of balls in the air, and you're trying to make it all feel grounded, seamless and emotional." There are a number of sequences that challenged Kerstein editorially. He points to the Ozdust Ballroom scene, where Elphaba makes her uncomfortable entrance, as one that would affect the audience and make them emotionally invest in the characters. "'Dancing Through Life' — The Ozdust Ballroom — is my favorite section of the movie," the editor reveals. "The reason is, is that 'Dancing Through Life' starts off as this sort of epic, Hollywood set- piece of a musical, but by the end of it, it's very emotional. You don't often get to do both things in a musical, and I've watched this thing so many times back, and every single time it makes me cry. And if that scene and that set piece did not work, the rest of the movie wouldn't work." Kerstein says getting a scene like that to work is the greatest satisfaction in filmmaking and story- telling. He also points to Chistery's transformation into a flying monkey, and the 'Defying Gravity' musical sequence, where Elphaba takes to her fly- ing broom and dons her dramatic cape, as intense moments editorially too. What viewers might not realize is that the film's opening sequence also took considerable thought to put together. "The opening of the movie really dogged us for a really long time," he shares. "On paper, you're just like, 'She's telling a story, and then we're off to the races.' But there's a lot of backstory there. We had Glinda, who's telling us the story, sort of just stand- ing on this pedestal for 20 minutes. How do we condense [this], and how do we make this work so that it feels like the beginning of something bigger?" Kerstein found inspiration while watching Disney's Lilo & Stitch with his 11-year-old son at a local art-house. "We used to have the title for the movie as soon as the monkeys crashed through the glass," he re- calls of the initial edit. But as he was watching the animated Disney feature, he realized they were well into the film before credits appear. "I'm watching this movie for like ten minutes, and then I realized, it's one big prolog," he shares. "So the next day, after I saw the movie, I said to Jon, 'We have to Lilo & Stitch the opening of Wicked. So that gave us the idea to put the title way (into it)…It gives us permission to sort of (say), everything we're about to watch is set-up…The movie is about their relation- ship, but if we treat everything else like a prolog, then that will feel a little bit more acceptable and exciting when you see this title for the first time." VISUAL EFFECTS Oscar- nominated visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman (The Irishman) has been with Industrial Light & Magic for 28 years and was — as he calls it — "on loan" to Universal for work on Wicked, serving as the film's head of VFX. Most of the feature's visual effects were split between ILM and Framestore, collectively amounting to more than 2,200 shots. Helman says the overall goal was to create "beautiful" and "completely photorealistic" visuals for a "fantastical film." ILM and Framestore served as the lead VFX vendors on the feature, with work split almost 50/50. ILM called on teams in San Francisco and Sydney, while Framestore tapped its talent in London and Montreal. "What happened is, we didn't really break it down by specific environments," he says of the studios' workloads. ILM handled the birth of Elphaba at the be- ginning of the film, which included the wolf and bear characters, and turned the live-action baby green in color. The studio also handled Glinda and Elphaba going to Emerald City, the wide shots of the city, the monkey transformation and the climactic 'Defying Gravity' sequence. Framestore, he says, did the majority of the work at the beginning of the movie, including Dr. Dillamond, the bespectacled goat, voiced by Peter Dinklage, who teaches at Shiz University, as well as the other animals. Compared to some of the other films he's worked on, Wicked had its own unique challenges. "Well, for one thing, we had a lot of crowd repli- cation, so we had a new approach to volume cap- ture," he explains. "That's a brand-new thing that is happening for crowds…This movie's more about making all the work that we do kind of delightful The film's 'Defying Gravity' sequence presented numerous post production challenges. Pablo Helman