Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/928269
www.postmagazine.com 22 POST JANUARY 2018 OSCAR CONTENDERS Over 400 people worked on it for two and a half years — six months faster than the first one. "Animal Logic began on it on day one, and I didn't wait for a script," reports McKay. "It was just me, Dave and the storyboard teams in L.A. and we began with paintings and storyboards. There was no traditional screenwriting process. We'd just bring writers in and adjust as we went. So we literally built the screenplay in post — and we could do that because animation is like filmmaking in slow motion, and we had great storytellers in post, like Burrows." The sound and music were also "crucial," adds McKay. "We recorded the score in Sydney and Vienna, and did the mix on the lot at Warners with a great team that included effects mixer Gregg Landaker and sound designer Wayne Pashley from Big Bang Sound in Sydney." War For The Planet Of The Apes also features impressive post work from director Matt Reeves and a team of collaborators that once again included editors William Hoy (Fantastic 4, 300) and Stan Salfas (Let Me In), as well as Weta Digital's senior visual effects supervisor and four-time Oscar winner Joe Letteri (The Lord of the Rings, Avatar), VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon and VFX producer Ryan Stafford who all oversaw the complex VFX and a team of hundreds of artists and technicians."When you make these huge, complex films full of cutting edge VFX, you literally begin post and all that stuff on day one during pre-production," reports Reeves. The third film in the trilogy has a lot of interaction between the apes, and also with horses and people, "so Weta began on all that right away, although the lion's share of the work was in post, all done on the Fox lot — all the sound, everything — and we spent a whole year on the post and had two whole floors in this post production building. One floor was dedicated to editorial, and the other to VFX, and I'd spend one half of the day in editorial, and then the other on VFX." Reeves says that there were "significantly more VFX shots on this film than the last one, plus so many more ape shots which were so complex to create. There were only 10 to 15 shots without any VFX, so it was insane. Weta did them all and Dan Lemmon was on the set and we spoke every day, and we had some very challenging sequences, like the avalanche, where we used fluid dynamics and physics to get it right. We also used a lot of new tools, such as Manuka physLight, which allows you to light the apes as if a DP was lighting them, and we also used this new system called Totara developed by Weta, which mimics nature in the way trees develop and age. All the VFX were quite daunting, but as we began post so early, it was actually easier to finish than the last film." The DI was done at Company 3 on the Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve. "We tried really hard to get exactly the right contrast, and all that was driven by what made the apes look as photo-realistic as possible," sums up Reeves. "So it was all very carefully calibrated. The weird thing is, we were doing post for over a year, but the movie only looked like the movie at the very end. It was like seeing it for the very first time." Kong: Skull Island, directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, featured a stellar creative behind-the-scenes team that included editor Christian Wagner (the "Fast & Furious" films), and the legendary Kong was brought to life on a whole new scale by Industrial Light & Magic, with two-time Oscar winner Stephen Rosenbaum (Avatar, Forrest Gump) serving as visual effects supervisor. Post was all done at Pivotal in Burbank, and the sound mix was done at Skywalker. VFX supervisor Jeff White at ILM did the majority of the VFX work, Vogt- Roberts reports. The DI was done at Fotokem with colorist Dave Cole who worked on Lord of the Rings. Writer-director Todd Haynes, Oscar-nominated for his Far From Heaven fifties drama, is a supreme visual stylist with a deep affection for period pieces, and his new film Wonderstruck, set in the '20s and the '70s, is also generating a lot of Oscar buzz. It's his first film with kids in the leads — and the fact that they're both deaf opened up a "lot of possibilities" he reports, as the '20s sec- tion plays largely like a silent film in B&W. "We did all the post at Harbor Post in New York — the cutting, the sound, the VFX and the DI," he adds. The Shape of Water of Water of Star Wars: Star Wars: Star The Last Jedi Last Jedi Last Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Wonder Woman Wonder Woman Wonder