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May/June 2019

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www.postmagazine.com 29 POST MAY/JUNE 2019 SUMMER MOVIES process that is now helping to accelerate and vali- date the work at critical phases." How did the visualization process help support story and character development? Shannon Justison: "Working with story and character is all about working with the needs of the director or directors, and the requirements of the specific film. For instance, on Thor: Ragnarok, it was important to the director, Taika Waititi, to develop an epic goodbye scene for Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, with Thor at the height of his confidence and prowess using his mighty hammer. Once the hammer is lost, Thor is forced to adjust both his fighting style and how he perceives himself as a warrior and a person. And then by the end of the film, when he finally realizes himself as the God of Thunder, we get a whole new style of fighting that exploits the full extent of his powers. As someone who worked on a Thor-fecta (aka all three Thor films), it was a lot of fun to follow his character evolution over the years." GR: "One of the great things about working on multiple films is being able to grow with the char- acters and story. The boundaries for what these characters could do would be pushed in each film and, as the characters grew stronger physically and narratively with each film, we grew stronger cre- atively. This insight was vital when it later came to collaborating with the film teams on a film as mas- sive as Avengers: Endgame." How did The Third Floor's role evolve over these projects? SJ: "Visualization itself has evolved massively from the early days of Iron Man 2 and Thor. During those earlier films, previs generally served as more of an open sandbox to explore ideas and functioned like storyboards on set. Although the previs process today still has a lot of 'sandbox' exploration, with the higher fidelity in previs characters, high degree of communication between departments and the expansion of technologies like LIDAR and photo- grammetry, we're able to deliver previs that can be shot 1:1 with the real world, if desired. Or those same technologies can be leveraged to explore the possi- bilities of what the shooting crew can achieve given a certain set or location. "Postvis was even newer at the beginning and has developed from a 'this could be nice to have' to a critical factor into post production. Similarly, new advances in virtual production have made it possible for us to help plan ever more technologi- cally demanding shoots, such as the Valkyrie battle against Hela in Thor: Ragnarok, or the size and scale digital cinematography of Ant-Man and Ant- Man and the Wasp. So as visualization has evolved and become more precise, expansive and techno- logically adept, the contributions of teams like ours have grown from being a helpful option for story Production for the 'assemble' scene Heroes arrive mid-charge Previs and postvis have become a larger part of filmmaking. Showdown with Thanos

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