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OSCAR PREDICTIONS www.postmagazine.com 20 POST JANUARY 2017 comes to life. After seeing it in dailies for so long, it's such a pleasure to see it like this. We did everything from the overall look to saturation and contrast matching, and some re-composition now and again. We shot the film in a very precise way and com- posed shots very specifically, but the DI lets you do some re-comps if needed when you simply don't have the time on the day of the shoot, especially with exterior stuff." Two more blockbusters with a ton of VFX each, along with impressive editing and sound elements — the epic action adventure The Legend of Tarzan and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a return to the wizarding world created by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling — both come from the same director, the prolific and hard-working David Yates, who previously directed the last four of the blockbuster Harry Potter films. And both Tarzan and Beasts relied heavily on Yates' go-to, behind- the-scenes creative team, including editor Mark Day (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Parts 1 & 2), and Oscar winner and VFX supervisor Tim Burke (the Harry Potter franchise). A veteran of colossal projects with thousands of moving parts, Yates began integrating post and all the VFX on day one on both films. "We used the same process we established on Potter, where we'd edit a sequence, let it sit for a bit, then after a few days or a couple of weeks we'd go back in and fine-tune it, and then we'd turn it over to the VFX guys," he explains. "They'd do their initial blocking and then we'd fine-tune it again. And it's a remark- ably fluid system in the sense that six months later when the picture's done and it's all shot, I go back again and do another fine-tune. That gives you an enormous amount of flexibility if I wanted to change my mind about anything, and we'd be swapping out shots and changing shots quite late into the process. And the VFX vendors were always great and accommodating, even though I put them under pressure a lot. They were always very helpful when I changed my mind about something." Post was all done in London at De Lane Lea, with some pre-mixing at Pinewood. Yates also used the back-to-back productions to test a new workflow and way of working with regular edi- tor Mark Day. "Usually I shoot, he assembles, and we're a well-oiled team by now, but we actually changed the way we work recently. On Tarzan, I'd shoot, he'd assemble it the next day, then I'd watch it, give notes, he'd tune it a bit, then we'd look at the scene again a couple of weeks later. So we'd be constantly changing scenes during the shoot, and I'd rush over to the edit every time I had a spare 30-minutes on the floor because of a lighting change. So every shooting day was about shooting and editing. But on Beasts I decided to experiment, and not see Mark every day, and just let him get on with it. So on Beasts I spent all my time on the floor, or with my storyboard guys or previs team, focusing on conceiving stuff, and then I saw Mark every few weeks — and that proved to be far less schizophrenic than bouncing back and forth from shooting to editing. So that's how we're going to do it from now on." With all the recent advances in VFX, Yates and his longtime VFX supervisor Tim Burke, who did all the Potter films with him, were able to create real beasts of the jungle as easily as the fantastic beasts, and used a variety of vendors, including Framestore, Double Negative, Rodeo FX, Cinesite and MPC. "In the end, for Tarzan we had over 1300 VFX shots, with everything from the gorillas and lions to zebras, ostriches and hippos, and we really raised the bar on the VFX, especially the scenes where Tarzan has to interact directly with an ani- mal," adds Yates. "For 'Beasts,' we had over 1500 shots, and it was a little freer as you're not having to replicate a real lion or tiger." Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who's been hailed as one of the most ambitious, iconoclastic, daring — and important — political filmmakers of his gener- ation, also has two new films, albeit much smaller productions; Jackie, about one of the greatest icons of the 20th century, starring Natalie Portman as first lady Jackie Kennedy, and set in the immediate af- termath of the Kennedy assassination, and Neruda, which focuses on the life of Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Neruda is Chile's Oscar submission, and Jackie, Larrain's first English-language film, is also getting a lot of Oscar and awards season buzz. He worked with editor Sebastian Sepulveda on Jackie, and the duo began cutting in Paris while they were shoot- ing, and then finished cutting it at Primo Solido, in Santiago, Chile. As with any period piece, the VFX play a big role, and Garage, a VFX company in Santiago, did about 80 percent of them, and Mikros and Digital District in Paris did the rest. While Larrain shot Jackie in Paris on film and on Super 16, he shot Neruda on Reds in Chile, Buenos Aires and Paris. "I still love shooting on film more than digital, but we had a great experience with the REDs," he states. "We did all the editing in Paris with Hervé Schneid, with a little help from Sebastian Sepulveda at the end." "I took over the cut when the original editor couldn't finish it in time for its Cannes debut," Sepulveda reports. "I worked on it for two weeks, and we changed quite a lot of things — especial- ly the music and the order of various scenes." Sepulveda did the fine-tuning in Chile while simulta- neously cutting Jackie. And finally, it's interesting to note that, at press time, the Oscar shortlist for VFX also includes — along with such expected contenders as Captain America: Civil War, The Jungle Book, Doctor Strange, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Arrival and Passengers — the animated Kubo and the Two Strings. Will the stop-motion film beat out the big boys on Oscar night? Stay tuned. Fences Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them Captain America: Civil War