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STANTON: "He edits all Spike Jones' films — Where the Wild Things Are and Adaptation — and Wild Things really prepped him well for this since he had to do so much digital post with all the creatures. He was already there mentally and knew what would be needed of the animation production side. He was in London, but usually a few miles away from the set. He'd get all the dailies and start making early cuts. Then I'd visit him in between shoot- ing at Shepperton and Longcross Studios. When we were in Utah for two months, he was based in LA and would come to the set every so often. But once principal photogra- phy was over, that's when we began editing in earnest, and we were in the same room for almost two years, working on cuts. "The unique thing on this film is, we shot tons of plates and with several scenes, what you shot is what you get. But there was so much where what we shot was the back- ground with representation of what would ultimately be there — whether it was a per- formance by an actor or scenes with crea- tures. So much was still missing in terms of information to tell the story. We had to do this whole middle step in 2010 where we had to storyboard all these missing elements that we'd be adding later, just so someone — whether it was us or the studio head — could actually see what we planned to do with the rough assembly of the live-action footage." POST: Where did you edit and what equip- ment did you use? STANTON: "We did it all on Final Cut Pro, which we decided on very early. After starting in London and LA, we set up our post in San Francisco where I'm based, a mile or so Dneg's Peter Chiang was VFX supervisor for John Carter. Cinesite and MPC also provided shots. to do all the computer-animated characters for the film, and when we met with Peter and his team, their group really reminded me of how Pixar felt in its early days, so it was good match. They were up-and-coming and their passion and talent eclipsed their inexperience at that point. I loved that! I could tell Peter really had a great eye. You're not hiring people for their equipment or even their resume. You're hiring them because they're artists with great eyes and instincts, which is what saves you when you hit all the inevitable problems." POST: There's, obviously, a huge number of visual effects shots in the film. How many are there, and what was your approach to dealing with them? STANTON: "It's in the thou- Efilm's Mitch Paulson provided color grading for the digital intermediate. from Pixar, so I could also do my Pixar duties for the last year or so but also work on this." POST: Your visual effects supervisor was Peter Chiang, who runs Double Negative, the London-based effects house. How did that rela- tionship work? STANTON: "We auditioned all these VFX house as we had to figure out who was going sands! There are far fewer non- effects shots by a huge margin. In the end the VFX work was so heavy no one place could do it all and we used three visual effects houses. Cinesite did all the environments and any inanimate objects, like ships. Double Negative did all the charac- ter animation and anything with actors or creatures involved, but even that was an overload, so we then brought in MPC. So that we kept the continuity to all the VFX, we found a couple of standalone sequences and gave them to MPC (who did 180 shots)." POST: What was the most dif- ficult visual effects sequence/shot to do and why? STANTON: "There's a couple. One is in the middle, where Carter saves princess Dejah and it's pretty much a confluence of everything we had to do in the film, all in one big action scene. So we left it to the end, as we had to work out how our airships and environments would look. And it felt like we were taming that beast to the last shot. Then there's www.postmagazine.com a later scene where we had to convey tech- nology that's so advanced beyond anything we know, that it's like synapses in the brain. I felt I was trying to describe this for three continued on page 50 Broaden Your Horizons gvs SD: 720x576 HD: 1920x1080 4K: 4096x2160 GVS9000 VTR 4K • 4K Uncompressed playback or record • GVS9000VTR Controls, RS422, and TCP/IP • 10 Gigabit shared storage • HD SDI, DVI, HDMI I/O www.gvs9000.com 415-777-0320 • 800-794-4622 Post • April 2012 15