Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1151081
56 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2019 dialogue and comments. "We shot digital, and by the next morning, we would be getting dailies in the Avid," Marra says. "Right away, Jenny would check the dailies and start tagging the start and stop of a take. With digital, the camera would sometimes not stop rolling. So you have to take out [portions of takes] where everyone is just going around changing things or babbling, so that Larry doesn't waste time watching that. We decided to put markers on the take at the start of every spoken line. "At the same time, Sara would start doing the scripting and had to type in all the ad libs, and mark them as such," he continues. "It all had to be script-synched verbatim. Sarah did a fantastic job with that, and [LA- based second assistant] Diana Santana did likewise with the additional photography. That really sped us up, because when you are looking for stuff through 10 takes, and gobs of improvising, without such a system you might never finish the film." Everyone on the post team emphasizes the collaborative nature of the work and the need for each to understand and participate in the visual effects workflow. Indeed, Marra initially served as first assistant in Atlanta before moving up to visual effects editor, while Saulnier took over as first assistant editor during the director's cut, but then left the show. Rolf Fleischmann joined the show as first assistant to oversee turnovers to sound, music, DI and final delivery to Netflix. Part of the work they did, along with visual effects assistant Michelle Gold, repeatedly walked a line between editorial and visual effects, as particular tasks were largely handled in the editorial room. Working closely with visual effects supervisor Bryan Jones, who oversaw several facilities that worked on the movie, the team templated particular CG effects, built certain effects themselves and erased or fixed prosthetic flaws. "The template of all the visual effects was certainly created in editorial," confides Jordan. "I could not have done this film without someone like Jose, who knows both visual effects and editorial. Much of what he did would not have been time-efficient or workflow-efficient to send out to a visual effects house. We needed to create these effects rapidly, as soon as the director asked for them." BEWARE OF BABY PETE One of the most challenging visual effects in the extended sequences cut by Jordan is the portrayal of the Baby Pete character. He is the youngest sibling, with a diminutive body that can't possibly belong to the real Marlon Wayans, though the character clearly has Wayans' head and face. Cutting segments together featuring Baby Pete, and trying to find the correct body parts to fit together, was an adventure for the entire editorial team. "We had takes where Marlon was on the bed acting out the lines, and then we had the same angles, but with a body double listening to the lines and moving his body accordingly," Marra explains. "Larry would cut the scene using just the layer with Marlon, and I would go back and find the right pieces of body performance to fit Marlon's lines. It is amazing how much you can change a whole take by just switching the body. Hand gestures can tell more of the story than I would have guessed." One aspect of Jordan's typical methodology that evolved during the project was his move up to using two 32- inch HP 2K monitors, due to the volume of visual effects material he had to sort through. He says he went through a "monitor journey" during the course of the editorial process on this movie as he grappled with the best way to deal with layers of material on the Avid timeline. "I had vertical monitors, I had ultra- wide monitors, and finally ended up with two giant 32-inch monitors," the editor explains. "I don't typically like to work with a lot of tracks when working with the director, because I want to execute our ideas as quickly as possible. But on this show, I was required to work with loads of tracks; the bigger monitors helped me manage that challenge." Santana emphasizes that, to a large degree, everybody in editorial dived into some aspect of the visual effects workflow. "I was in charge of updating lineups for every visual effects shot," she says. "Jose would add all updated temp effects shots to a bin for me, and I would Rolf Fleischmann. Diana Santana. "This was a huge volume of footage, making it one of the most challenging projects of my career," Larry Jordan says. "They shot nearly 200 hours of dailies, much of it improv."