Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/910366
www.postmagazine.com 10 POST NOVEMBER 2017 DIRECTOR'S CHAIR later. The other big challenge with these huge productions with a million moving parts is maintaining control over the con- stantly-changing and evolving story, and it's always in flux. The only constant is the tone and the sense of fun and adventure, and that feeling of life that I had right at the start." How tough was the shoot? "It was 85 days, by far the longest shoot I've ever done, but it wasn't grueling. We shot in Australia and it was more about maintaining the energy for that long, and keeping your brain creative and loose and open, and it was quite taxing on the mind and body. But we had a lot of fun, and I love being on-set and all the camaraderie with the crew and actors. We didn't shoot 3D — we convert- ed it in post, but as we knew it was a 3D release, we designed a lot of shots just for that, like in the fight scenes." Did you do a lot of previs? "I don't usually use previs on my films, but we had to do a lot on this one. It was all done by The Third Floor (and Day For Nite). We used it as a suggestion and rough guide rather than slavishly following it frame by frame. Some people do, but I wanted to keep it loose and use it more as a skeleton as we'd often change a lot of the elements on the day, and I like to improvise a lot." All the visual effects were obviously crucial. How early on did you integrate post and VFX with the production? "We began right away in pre-production as we knew this was going to be a very VFX-heavy film, especially as you have all these different worlds, and we knew we had a lot of work to do just to create them. We wanted to spend enough time developing the look with a lot of layers, so it wasn't just cool buildings. We wanted to give a sense of how it all worked, and then we had the wormholes and we had a lot of fun dealing with those and how they'd work, but it took a lot of work figuring it all out. And I think the result shows all that. It feels thought-through, not rushed and just thrown together, and it really helped that we ended up having a very long post process to really pull all that together." [See page 14 for full VFX feature.] How long was post? "We finished shooting in November last year, so it's been pretty much a full year of post — very long." Where did you do the post? "It was all done in LA on the Disney lot, which is where all the Marvel films are posted. It's a great set up as all the de- partments are right there and you can just walk from one to another, which makes it very convenient." The film was edited by Joel Negron and Zene Baker. Tell us about that relationship and how it worked with two editors. "Joel was down in Australia with us and did a rough assembly while we shot, and did some work on a few scenes. But I was so busy with the shoot that I didn't really have time to sit down with him till we got back to LA. Then Zene joined the team back in LA and he's got a great background in comedy, just like Joel, who's also done all these huge films like Transformers with Michael Bay and 21 Jump Street. So they were a great team Director Waititi (right) on-set with actress Tessa Thompson. Thor: Ragnarok required a large amount of blue screen for heavy VFX.