Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1151081
54 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2019 The movie tells the tale of a young man (Wayans) about to be a father who discovers shortly before his wedding that he was adopted from a brood of sextuplets. He sets out to find his siblings, ends up on a wacky road trip and learns a little something about the meaning of family along the way. The movie comes from the same creative team that produced Wayans' last two comedy features: Naked (2017) and Fifty Shades of Black (2016), both cut by Sextuplets editor Lawrence Jordan, ACE. However, Sextuplets is a lot more ambitious and technically complex, with approximately 1,000 visual effects shots. Filmed in Atlanta for about 10 weeks, it was cut by Jordan and his team from 200 hours of original source material. Post-production in Los Angeles took about nine months. "This was a huge volume of footage, making it one of the most challenging projects of my career," Jordan says. "They shot nearly 200 hours of dailies, much of it being improv. So everything had to be script-synched and catalogued with markers and comments, just so I could find material in a reasonable amount of time." In LA, the editorial team worked on five Avid Media Composer (v.8.9.4) workstations, cut the movie in the DNX 115 format, shared a server with visual effects, and relied on Nexis storage, including nightly backup via a ChronoSync system to a 20-terabyte hard drive. They also upgraded their in-house screening room projector to 4K for the project to allow them to review complex visual effects at their editorial offices. Meanwhile, visual effects editor Jose Luis Marra emphasizes that there were often exceptionally long takes shot by DP Don Burgess, ASC, using the RED Monstro 8K digital camera system, reduced in the finish to 5K and delivered in 4K. "There were often 30-minute takes — literally, they would start the camera and keep going until they ran out of storage on the card," Marra explains. "So it wasn't like Larry could just go from one take to another all the time. Sometimes, he had to be able to find the nuances and remember jokes from different takes. That was a huge challenge." The complication of Wayans playing seven characters (all six siblings, plus their mother) meant that Jordan's team had to innovate to keep track of every improvised take, and portions of takes, so they could efficiently find Rolf Fleischmann, left, Jose Luis Marra, Larry Jordan, Diana Santana and Andrew Silver. Sextuplets. Netflix