Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1334761
VISUAL EFFECTS www.postmagazine.com 19 POST JAN/FEB 2021 occasional moment here and there, but they shot the body of all that there in those places. "The bus scene in Bangkok, where she's in the bus with the other flight attendants — that's all real. It's incredi- ble. That's a lot of what we do for most shows, because it's impossible to do without a budget, but they really wanted to get the real sense of being there, so they actually did that." The flashbacks are unique in that they are both effects and editorial techniques. "It's a combination of both. Some of them [are] us, some of it is editorial, after our work. We worked with editorial to design an effect that would work for some of those. Each one is slightly differ- ent. It's a combination of us and editorial. "We do that a lot. It comes down to what makes most sense. If it's easier for us to do it, we do it." Where are the greenscreen/bluescreen moments that viewers may not be aware of? "There are a couple of moments. There's a car crash sequence on a country road where we had to shoot bluescreen be- cause of when they shot it and what sea- son it needed to take place in. We had to do some seasonal work on that. "There's a scene where there's a roof- jump sequence. That's a traditional visual effect. Cassie and one of her friends needed to jump from one rooftop to an- other rooftop, and obviously we couldn't have them do that, so we had them jump over bluescreen." How many shots did FuseFX handle in the eight episodes? "I think the bigger episodes, we have done over 50 shots…I think a range be- tween 20 and 50 per episode. Upwards of 50 for bigger episodes." What would you consider the highlights from a visual effects standpoint? "I think it would start with the flash- backs. What's interesting is there are different versions of those. Where she is seeing things that happened in the past. Those are essential. Our challenge was to keep it in this photoreal world but also, it has to have this elegant and beautiful moment, where we can't hint that it's a flashback. "Then the rabbits were wonderful for us. I think that's the order. Then there's the roof jumping and invisible work that we've done." How did the pandemic affect your workflow? "For this show, it was all done in the New York office exclusively. It was the perfect show to do it. We started working on it ahead of the pandemic. When the pandemic hit and New York was locked down and you couldn't go into the office, we were able to [continue working] because of the technical advantages of our pipeline. We went remote within 24 hours of the New York City shut- down. And what that meant was all of our artists could work remotely on their workstations in our office. How big was the team working on this show? "Twenty artists or less. I think it ranged from 10 to 20 at any time. They work on multiple projects at once. There are moments that expand and contract. We have lead artists that are always on a show." Can you talk about some of the VFX tools you employed for this show specifically? "For this show we used Nuke for com- positing and we used Studio Max for CG work. We do use Maya, but for this project we weren't using it. And lots of Nuke plug-ins." What other shows are being worked on at FuseFX? "We are working on 17 active shows. Blacklist, Pose, Bull, The Good Doctor, Prodigal Son…Evil comes back into pro- duction soon." How would you describe your experience on The Flight Attendant? "There was a very good team on this show, from the showrunner down to the production designer and DPs and directors. All of the production people and the post people especially that we were dealing with. The post producer was amazing. The whole team was great. What was really helpful was that everyone was on the same page from the beginning to the end of what we needed to achieve." VFX are meant to be photoreal. FuseFX provided on-set supervision. Some episodes feature as many as 50 VFX shots. This scene, with a giant rabbit, was one of the more challenging.