Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/100015
main unit shooting and 195 days of second unit shooting, they still had 1,100 hours of footage for each eye ��� the equivalent of nearly 24 million feet of film. The most dailies they had in a single day was 11 hours of footage for each eye. Olssen���s support team, led by first assistant editor Dan Best, was made up of eight assistant editors, including two VFX editors who wrangled 25,000 clips. ���But ���there are multiple takes in each of those clips because Peter has a method we call ���rolling resets.��� He won���t cut between takes. He���ll just tell the actors to go back and start again.��� There were 13 Avid Media Composers, but some assistants used more than one Avid. JACKSON���S PROCESS ���Peter likes to be heavily involved with the actual editing.��� The first step, says Olssen, is for him to ���chop up the footage��� and ���line up all the takes.��� When Jackson comes into the editing room ���he looks at all the takes��� and makes his selects. Olssen typically does an assembly of the scene first, but he and Jackson will work on the scene from scratch, then compare it to Olssen���s earlier version, and perhaps merge aspects of the two. ���He���s not a director who limits himself to one way of cutting a scene,��� describes Olssen. ���He will shoot options and coverage. He will provide choices for the cutting room. Always with Peter���s films, you have to explore the scene and make big choices about which way to tell the story. You���re not going to end up with a couple of cool camera moves that can���t be used because they cover the same piece of the story.��� Creatively, Olssen prepped for the edit by watching all the Lord of the Rings movies, rereading The Hobbit and reading the script. His approach was to ���treat it like any other film. the same.��� Regardless, he says, if it���s a quieter drama piece or big spectacle ���you try to find the best takes, the best rhythm to the scene and how you want to tell the story.��� Stylistically, Olssen says the movie is consistent with the other Lord of the Rings movies because Peter Jackson is directing. ���By following the natural rhythms and style of each scene, it ends up with a similar stylistic connection to Lord of the Rings.��� Jackson, he says, ���wants it to be an immersive experience. Once you���ve made the decision to go 3D, you���ve moved away from the ���normal��� cinematic experience. Traditionally, cinema has been 2D. Once you go to 3D you are trying to make it more realistic.��� Shooting at 48fps, notes Olssen, is primarily to reduce strobbing and flicker that causes eyestrain for the 3D version of the movie ��� the 2D version will be exhibited at 24fps. ���You increase the frame rate and it���s more comfortable to watch. Reducing eyestrain is a good thing.��� Most of the new technology, 3D and 48fps, was transparent creatively to the editing process. ���We would see the 3D when we conformed the scenes,��� says Olssen. ���Occasionally we would make allowances and alterations because of the stereoscopic depth.��� So for example, they might hold shots a bit longer. Generally he says, ���If you are cutJabez Olssen with his Avid Media Composer V.6 set-up. ting on the small size screen and then see it on a cinema big The footage for a scene comes in and you screen you often extend the wide shots a look and put it together as it feels it should go. few more frames.��� Whether there���s greenscreen or missing CG But they didn���t want to limit the 2D experimonsters from the scene, you treat all films ence either. ���We didn���t want the technique to rule the dramatic decisions of the storytelling.��� There were not as many changes as Olssen had expected. ���We were thinking when we set out that we���d have to cut it, conform it in 3D at 48 frames and then change it, but at the end of the day there wasn���t as much of that. There were very few tweaks. What���s working dramatically for the story continues to work no matter the format. So generally what would work in one medium would work for the other.��� THREE FILMS, NOT TWO So how did The Hobbit evolve into three movies? ���There always was going to be two movies,��� explains Olssen. ���By doing three movies it allows us to keep the good material people remember. The Hobbit is only a 300page book, but there���s a lot of story in there. People complain with film adaptions of a book about all the good things that got chopped out. Three films will allow us to keep the characters and many iconic moments and events from the book. A lot of story is alluded to in the appendices in The Lord of the Rings. After writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien went back and fleshed out all that time when Gandalf leaves the dwarfs, so that���s being told as well.��� In the last weeks of post, Olssen moved from the The Hobbit soundstages to Park Road Post (www.parkroadpost.co.nz), where everyone was working around the clock to finish the film. ���We���ll go into the mixes and give notes on the VFX shots and listen to the Atmos reviews.��� He���s also ���working on the last stages of the second film,��� but notes ���not a lot has been done on the third one so far!��� Park Road Post would conform scenes in 3D at 48fps and screen them in 2K 3D at 48fps in a full-size digital theater.