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VFX & post anyone's elbow but would make director's rounds between visual effects and editorial. From an editing standpoint both editors concur the movie was vir- tually problem free. "You always work on certain sections more than other sections, but not be- cause it didn't work."The question about editing a scene says Dalva is, "should we shape it this way or should we shape it that way?" "There's always a scene in a movie," says Ford,"where you get it to the sweet spot and it always plays; you never have to touch it again.There's always a scene where you see more ideas until they rip it out of your hands. I'm willing to keep trying until the last minute. The problematic scenes you tend to solve; the scenes that you never finish editing are the ones that can be done a bunch of different ways, and you can't decide which way is best for the character because they all work." VFX & POST-VIS As the cut was being built, visual effects shots would show in the timeline as backplates or slugs.The editorial team worked with The Third Floor and Scott Hankel on Editor Jeff Ford: "There wasn't a lot of coverage, but it was really smart coverage." multiple units.There wasn't a lot of cover- age, but it was really smart coverage," notes Ford. "Joe is efficient," echoes Dalva. "He knows what he wants. He covers scenes, he doesn't over cover scenes. He's a great visu- alist. He understands where the camera should be and how it should work with the blocking he's designed. Cutting is never easy, but he makes it easier.What he brought to Captain America more than anything is heart. That's one of his great talents." "We were right next store to each other," recalls Ford."Which meant that only one of us could be working on a loud scene at one time because you could hear the ma- chine guns and shield through the walls." Ford and Dalva would give notes to each other on sequences, recut them, then show the revised cut to Johnston. Some- times they wouldn't agree on all those notes, but they "always inspired conversa- tions which led to making a better scene. When you talk about it that just leads to better ideas," comments Ford. "We would play off each other" explains Dalva, but ultimately everything they did was for the director. Johnston didn't sit at 18 Post • August 2011 post visualization effects shots, which would be built comped together in Autodesk's Maya, in Adobe After Effects and dropped into the scene. "The director is an artist himself," describes Hankel. "He would draw up the story- boards of what he intended from the plates." Hankel would then take the plates, flesh that out by adding CG elements provided by the VFX vendors, animate and ex- port the scene, pass that on to Townsend for approval, then to editorial to cut into the movie. Over the three months of post-vis The Third Floor averaged over 30 shots a week with a three- to five-person team."What we do is fast — turn things around in a couple of hours and give it to editorial.A single shot would get revised 10 or 15 times playing with different elements," continues Hankel. The final cut and approved post-vis scenes would then get sent back to the vendors as a guide for building final shots. Marvel Studios was also the review cen- www.postmagazine.com ter for all visual effects work. Shots would come in from all over the world through the studio's ultra secure file transfer and server systems. Visual effects supervisor Townsend wran- gled a global battalion of VFX companies and supervisors working on more than 1,547 VFX shots that included: Double Neg- ative, Charlie Noble; Lola VFX, Edson Williams; Fuel VFX, David Morley; Method Studios, Sean Faden; The Senate, Richard Higham;Trixter, Allessandro Cioffi; Frame- store, Jonathan Fawkner;The Base Studio, James Pina; Matte World Digital, Craig Bar- ron; Look FX, Max Ivins; Peanut FX, Amelie Guyot and Peregrine Mccafferty; Evil Eye Pictures, Daniel Rosen; Luma Pictures,Vin- cent Cirelli; Whiskey Tree, Jonathan Harb; Rise Effects, Florian Gellinger and Hydraulx. Thompson also managed Stereo D and 4DMax, the two companies responsible for the Captain America's 3D conversion. "A lot of the photography defines the vi- sual effect," explains Ford. "The actors do their thing and we'll work the effect in later. The tail was not wagging the dog here. It was about story and performance.The best stuff in this movie nobody is going to notice. It's a performance-driven, character-driven movie." SKINNY STEVE Lola VFX provided 350 shots, including Red Skull shots and the remarkable "skinny Steve" sequences where Chris Evans be- comes the character of Steve Rogers as the Look VFX provided 65 shots for the film, including animating the all-important shield. 97-pound weakling. Evans told Johnston that he felt it was crucial for his character to do the actual physical action in those scenes, and the director concurred. During principal photography, Evans played the shorter character by stooping down or playing to higher eyeline marks on the other actors."On set we would shoot continued on page 47