Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/915639
www.postmagazine.com 17 POST DECEMBER 2017 DIRECTOR'S CHAIR Where did you do the post and how long was post? "It's been a huge rush for a film of this scale as we were still shooting in March, and we were locked into our Christmas release. So post and editorial has been an incredibly fast turnaround. We split it up and we've done most of the post on the Fox lot. Cameron stayed on all the way from pre-production to post, and I'm still working with him, and Joel Chang, the concept artist, painted every single frame of the film we ever shot, showing everyone what we wanted to do. So when the production designer came on board, they could see exactly the look and feel we were going for, and like Cameron, Joel stayed on all the way from pre-production to post, and in post he did all the matte paintings and helped with the color grading as the look was so specific." I heard you used multiple editors, including Joe Hutshing. Tell us how it worked. "Joe started cutting as we shot, then Tom Cross, who cut La La Land and Whiplash for Damien Chazelle, and Robert Duffy came on to work on some of the musical numbers, and then Spencer Susser came on and did a pass at all the musical numbers. He's a very talented director and is incredibly musi- cal, and although he's not really an edi- tor, I knew he'd bring this fantastic sense of rhythm and tempo, so we worked very closely together — not just on the musical numbers, but on finding the best rhythms for all the transition scenes so they all flowed together. And then we also had Mike McCusker, who did a lot of the dramatic scenes. So it was a case of making all the musical numbers really show-stopping moments, and all the dramatic scenes really powerful. And then we've had test screenings and used all that feedback." How many visual effects shots are there in the film and who did them? "Thousands. We split it up and it's all over the place, actually. We're doing some in Vancouver, some in New York for the rebates and a lot in LA, where we're doing a lot of it ourselves inter- nally with a small crew. And then for the bigger VFX, like the CG animals, we used MPC. We also had a bunch of other vendors such as Shade, Lola, Brainstorm doing stuff, and they're all still working on it as we speak." Where are you doing the DI? "With Company 3, at their suite at Fox, and we just started. We're grading on the [Blackmagic Design] DaVinci Resolve 14 and the colorist is Tim Stipan, who did Deadpool and Black Swan, and he's so great. It's basically him, me and Joel Chang, and we're literally going back to some of Joel's artwork he did before we even started shooting. It's very specif- ic color work, and we're sometimes painting frame- by-frame, enhancing stuff, changing stuff as the VFX come in. And we're spend- ing a lot more time on the DI than you'd usually do." You've shot campaigns for Evian, Samsung, Toyota, Peugeot, T-Mobile and Macy's, as well as music videos for Elton John, the Black Eyed Peas, Jennifer Lopez and Pink, so you must be very familiar with that process? "Very. Complete Post in Melbourne, where I grew up, was the first house in Australia to get Flame, and I went there and learned from the late Peter Webb, the guy who literally wrote the Flame manual and who was a brilliant VFX pioneer and Flame expert. And I was also there with Wayne Haag, an insanely-tal- ented artist who's working on Showman with me, and Grant Petty, who founded Blackmagic back in the '80s, and it's wonderful that those guys from my first real job in the industry are now there with me on my first film, and that I was able to use the Blackmagic cameras and grade on the Resolve, which is also from Blackmagic. And I'm doing all the com- positing for the film with their Fusion on my laptop with 6K files." Did it turn out the way you hoped? "I think back to seven years ago when Hugh and I first talked about this, and he was so supportive over that time, and it's been a very long labor of love, but I do feel we captured something special and hopefully magical, thanks to all the people who worked so hard on it." Company 3 handled the DI. Arri and Blackmagic cameras were used. Multiple editors cut the feature.