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Prepared For Post Using a dolly provided a stable shot that allowed for coverage of the actor and back- ground tracking. "Most of Breaking Bad has a hand-held feel to it, so after we finished the shot, we put a hand-held look on top of (cinematog- rapher) Michael Slovis's dolly shot, so they would match with the surrounding shots." Velocity uses Nuke for compositing. Eric Leven was VFX supervisor on Tippett's work for Twilight: Break- ing Dawn — Part 1.. BREAKING DAWN — PART 1 Berkeley, CA's Tippett Studio (www.tip- pett.com) has a long history in feature film work, including visual effects for the Twilight saga. According to visual effect supervisor Eric Leven, the studio first got involved with the series by creating the photoreal wolf pack that appeared in the second film, New Moon, and has focused on the creatures ever since. Tippett shots featuring the wolves for the latest installment, Breaking Dawn, which hits the- aters this month. Breaking Dawn — Part 2 is scheduled for release in 2012, and will fea- ture the studio's handiwork as well. "Every movie has had a different produc- tion team, a different director, a different visual effects supervisor, so there is always a different attack to it," says Leven of Tippett's Twilight work. Breaking Dawn – Part 1 features one scene where the wolves are having a conversation with one another — an effect that had yet to be attempted. Another scene involves a large fight between the wolves and the Cullen family of vampires. "There's just a lot more action on the screen," he notes, when comparing it to their past work. Leven describes the Breaking Dawn project as "the absolute best possible scenario," because director Bill Condon and VFX supervisor John Bruno allowed Tippett to bring their expertise to the table. "We started with the script, and started recently completed effects drawing our own storyboards, and went through rounds of that with John and Bill," says Leven. "They would tweak it here and there, and then we'd work on animatics, and set it up so that by the time we were ready to shoot, we knew exactly what we were shooting and were able to do it really quickly and cost effectively." Leven likens it to the studio's past work Tippett is responsible for the wolf pack that has appeared in the franchise since the second film. with Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park, whereby previsualizing everything prior to the shoot allowed for an incredibly efficient production process. "I find that what we did on this movie — in terms of having the facil- 26 Post • November 2011 www.postmagazine.com