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OSCAR PREDICTIONS www.postmagazine.com 19 POST JANUARY 2017 in HD, and it was like a mirror image of the actual dailies, with a very simple LUT placed on them, and then they were shipped to LA. And then Nat and Joi worked off that, for the whole process." Jenkins says that he wanted the sound in the film to be "totally immersive," and mixed it at Wildfire in LA. While not a VFX-driven piece, the VFX played a significant role in the final look, and VFX house Significant Others worked hand in hand with colorist Alex Bickel at Color Collective in New York. The DI was done at Deluxe. Kenneth Lonergan and his intense family drama also look like locks for nominations, especially as the film got four SAG nominations, a crucial barome- ter and boost for Manchester by the Sea as actors make up the largest of the Academy's 17 branches. Both an ensemble piece and an intense character study, Manchester by the Sea tells the story of how the life of Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a griev- ing, solitary Boston janitor, is transformed when he reluctantly returns to his hometown to take care of his teenage nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) after the sudden death of his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler). It's deeply poignant, unexpectedly funny and an exploration of the power of familial love, community, sacrifice and hope. Lonergan and editor Jennifer Lame (Mistress America, Paper Towns) cut the film at Technicolor- Postworks in New York, and the director reports that the team "had a lot of creative fun" working with the film's extensive flashbacks which gradu- ally reveal the harrowing events from the past that affect Lee's present. Lame notes that, initially at least, all the time jumps gave her some trepidation, and she says that the reason the abrupt flash- backs, didn't become too confusing was because of Lonergan's assured script and direction. She also sees the flashbacks as a core part of Affleck's char- acter's emotional narrative. "The biggest challenge in the movie was the pacing and trying to figure out the meaning of go- ing back in time," Lame explains. "It's an emotional journey so we tried to be respectful of the emo- tion and not exploitive of it. Early in the process, Kenny was deciding on whether to have a device to shoot the flashbacks — whether to shoot them on different stock or aspect ratios. Eventually he de- cided not to do any of that, which I think was right. The way I decided to think of them was that they weren't flashbacks at all. It was like we were cutting two movies at once — the present of Lee's life and then Lee's life before the event in the middle of the film. If you look at the flashbacks, they are not memories, they are narrative. They are like mini movies in themselves." Lonergan's film is, like several other contenders, a small-budget indie. So just how important are the Oscars and other awards for such movies? "It's very important to getting people out to see smaller films like ours," he says. "We opened on just 300 screens, and now we're expanding to over 1,000, so the at- tention and word of mouth is vital. And that means that the film will now play in Texas and Oklahoma — not just in New York and LA, which I hope shows distributors that there's a sizeable audience out there for dramas like these." VISUAL EFFECTS / POST WORKFLOW / EDITING & SOUND Some of the year's biggest hits — Captain America: Civil War, The Jungle Book, Batman v Superman, Deadpool, Suicide Squad, Doctor Strange — also feature some of the year's most spectacular VFX. And some of the best were on display in the global blockbuster Deadpool, Tim Miller's feature film directing debut. Dark, dis- turbing, violent, irreverent, action-packed, seriously funny and unashamed- ly potty-mouthed, the R-rated Marvel comic book adaptation starred Ryan Reynolds in the title role and was a surprise hit, delighting hard-core fanboys everywhere and raking in $782 million globally on a budget of $58 million. Even more impressive is how Miller transformed a modest career working in animat- ed shorts into that of a potential A-lister with a fresh take on the com- ic book culture. Having honed his writing/direct- ing skills over the years, he was also able to draw on his VFX background and his own company Blur, which did the title sequence for David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The film's many VFX vendors included Weta, Luma, Ollin, Digital Domain and Rodeo FX, among others. Editing, sound and VFX in the blockbuster Suicide Squad may all get some Oscar attention, and director/producer/screenwriter David Ayer is no stranger to Oscar gold as his Training Day won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Denzel Washington. Ayer's behind-the-scenes stellar cre- ative team included editor John Gilroy and visual effects supervisor Jerome Chen, and he reports that Chen, who did the VFX on Ayer's Fury, and did the Spider-Man films and Beowulf and The Polar Express for Bob Zemeckis, came in right at the start. "We did extremely complex CG characters in this, so we spent a lot of time figuring out how to go about doing it and what were the best techniques and so on. It took a lot of time and work, and we also had to figure out all the computer time and the render farms we needed to generate the shots, so all the VFX were embedded in the shoot from day one. We set up witness cameras to record everything the crew did, we had constant telemetry and a ton of data gathering." Post was all done on the lot at Warners. Gilroy, whose diverse credits include Nightcrawler, Pacific Rim, The Bourne Legacy and the Oscar-nominated Michael Clayton, set up editorial in Toronto, "so it was up and running from the beginning, and he tried to keep up with the shoot as much as possi- ble, as we shot on film so there's the lag between photography and the dailies reaching editorial," Ayer notes. Well-known as a big shooter, Ayer shot over 1.5 million feet of film — "so it's a lot of work just to watch it and keep the assembly up to date. And then we did the main editing back on the lot. I love editing even though it's baffling and frustrating and wonderful, all at the same time. The challenge is always that you can make an infinite number of films out of the same footage, and whatever your ideas and dreams are going in, they're going to be shattered along the way — because the movie wants to be what it wants to be, and you can only fight that so much. You're wrestling every day to find the right film." All the VFX played a big role, and the film ultimately used thousands of VFX shots and a lot of vendors, with the main ones being MPC and Sony Pictures Imageworks. The DI was done at The Shed in Santa Monica, which runs Baselight's latest Generation VI system with more grading power. Ayer and his DP did the DI with colorist Yvan Lucas, who co-founded the company. "The DI is so important and it's almost my favorite part of post," says Ayer. "I get in there and look at every shot, and Yvan and the DP would do a pass and then I'd do one, and we'd keep passing the baton like that until we were all happy. For me, it's where the film really Arrival