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www.postmagazine.com 21 POST JANUARY 2018 OSCAR CONTENDERS previous royalty-themed, acclaimed 2006 film, The Queen (which won him his second Oscar nomination). The film's timely themes of race, religion and class, "immediately appealed to me," he says. "When I read [the script], I thought it was quite provocative." Judi Dench had portrayed Victoria already, in Mrs. Brown, back in 1997, "and you absolutely believe in her as Victoria," he notes of a performance which is garnering a lot of Oscar attention. Frears and his team, including production designer Alan MacDonald and DP Danny Cohen, "wanted it to feel period but do it in a more modern way, to get away from that lugubrious feeling and the heavy Victoriana," reports the director. "Post was about five months, all in London, and we cut it at Goldcrest where I've done all the post work on my last few films. I always use the same VFX team — Union VFX and VFX supervisor Adam Gascoyne, who did Florence Foster Jenkins and Philomena. The big VFX shots were of all the ships crossing the ocean, and a brilliant one of Florence." VISUAL EFFECTS, POST, EDITING & SOUND Some of the year's biggest hits — Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Wonder Woman, Beauty and the Beast, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Thor: Ragnarok, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2, Despicable Me 3, Logan, The Fate of the Furious, Dunkirk annd The LEGO Batman Movie – also feature some of the year's most spectacular VFX. And some of the best were on display in Star Wars (thanks to an army of VFX artists from ILM, Hybride and Rodeo), Wonder Woman (Weta, MPC, Pixomondo, Double Negative),Thor: Ragnarok (see the November issue's Director's Chair and VFX feature) and Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049. While the latter under-performed at the box office, it looks likely to get some Oscar love for its stunning VFX done by a raft of companies including Weta, MPC, BUF, Framestore, Double Negative and Rodeo — and it could also score a long-overdue win for cinematographer Roger Deakins. For editor Joe Walker (Oscar-nominated for Arrival and 12 Years a Slave), the challenge was to honor the original film's iconic look and feel without being slavish to it. He also had to deal with over 1150 VFX shots, and even a few CGI shots con- ceived in the cutting room, such as the vertiginous shot tumbling down to the Atari sign. Walker started his career in music/sound and both always play a big part in his editing work. On Blade Runner 2049, he incorporated some sound effects early on, even in the pre-vis temp tracks. "One of the first editors I learned from was Tariq Anwar who worked at the BBC," reports Walker who worked as his dubbing editor on 1990's The March. "He often created beautiful pre-lapped sound with either a sound effect or a voice ahead of the picture cut. I tried that on Blade Runner 2049 and it helped make the actual interroga- tion scene feel like a violent assault " On Dunkirk, Double Negative supplied the seamless VFX, and sound de- sign and music were key to underscoring the narrative race against time and unusual rhythms of the script. Sound designer and supervising sound editor Richard King recorded the motors of the various ships, "and then all that was sent through to Hans Zimmer's facility," editor Lee Smith says. "They sampled them in such a way that the engine sounds are always accelerating." The LEGO Batman Movie, directed by Chris McKay, who served as anima- tion director and editor on The LEGO Movie, also deserves consideration for its awesome animation (again done by Animal Logic) and editing (The Lego Movie's editor David Burrows also returned, joined by editors Matt Villa and John Venzon). Essentially, the whole film's one big VFX sequence, as every single frame is a VFX shot. "You're constantly working on it at the same time as you're writing and editing and so on, and it takes a big team of very focused animators and producers to do it," notes McKay, who also began on post once it was green-lit, "because post is everything in animation. You start in post and end in post." Mudbound The LEGO Batman Movie