Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/915639
www.postmagazine.com 20 POST DECEMBER 2017 STAR WARS "Obviously, some of the stuff that takes place in space, all that you have are actors on motion rigs to [look like they're] in the cockpit of an X-Wing or TIE Fighter, or whatever it might be. You only have that material that is live action. But honestly, there are large sets and even though there are going to be a lot of visual effects involved in a sequence — a light saber battle or something — you have the actors doing their thing and you are just missing some of the visual effects. So honestly, you're really able to conceive a lot of it and understand a lot of how it's going to work. "But, it does require an enormous imagination and a lot of faith. And it goes back to the experi- ence we were talking about earlier, that when the visual effects are applied to these things, this mo- ment is going to not only make sense, but also res- onate emotionally. And sometimes when you watch early cuts of these sorts of films, it's unimaginable it will ever be a movie. There is so much that is left to the imagination. It is sometimes very complex, especially when you have digital creatures, where the creature is not really there. Actors are reacting to nothing and you really don't have anything to base it on but some dialogue or sound effects." What was the visual effects shot count for The Last Jedi? "It has over 2,000 visual effects. It's a very large number, but not surprising for a movie of this sort." There must be a ton of previs being done to give everyone an idea of what is taking place in a scene? "In complicated sequences, you will have low-res- olution cartoon versions of what the action is supposed to be. And those assets are often used while they are shooting the live action elements to show an X-Wing going from here or there, or whatever are the specifics of the battle. A lot of those things are worked out prior to photography and prior to editing, but there is an enormous amount of stuff that is figured out in post produc- tion. It is a complicated process that really requires a sort of discipline and a big imagination." Are you using the previs imagery as a placeholder for pending VFX shots? "Absolutely! And to take The Last Jedi, which is a large movie of course, all big movies kind of work in this way. There is an in-house team of a few artists that were there to provide post. And what that would mean is, for example, if there's a creature of some sort who is not actually in the scene, we would cut the scene, make our best guess, because we know [what] the rough action of the character is going to be, and then the postvis team will generate crude anima- tion that will go into the plate. And we interact with that and say, 'Oh, I see we need another 10 frames for this to happen from here to here.' It's an iterative and interactive process. "Then, once that postvis is done in some rough form, the material will get turned over to the visual effects company — in this case Industrial Light & Magic — and they'll use that as a template to understand what it was we were thinking when we put that scene together. Then, that too becomes a highly-iterative process. Our visual effects supervisor, Ben Morris, and all the other great artists at ILM, they contribute in a way that allows new ideas to be interjected There were more than 2,000 VFX, completed by ILM. Ducsay cut the film on an Avid. Some scenes, with CG characters, were more complex to edit.