Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1357405
Manhattan Center Studios and Reservoir, and then mixed at Valhalla, and it was delivered to mixer Skip Lievsay, who did the final mix." Set in the sixties, the film used "a fair amount" of VFX, done by Zoic and Powerhouse VFX. "Jeremy Newmark was our VFX supervisor, and he did a great job, as it's full of clean up and the usual period stuff you need, and it's all invisible work," he notes. Mank, a black-and-white drama about the making of Citizen Kane, may have led the pack with 10 nominations, but at press time, Nomadland looks to be the frontrunner in both big races, and the production didn't have to contend with COVID, as shooting was spread out over six months beginning in September 2018 in South Dakota, and finishing early 2019 in Arizona and California. But the pandemic seems to be prophetically written into its DNA and its concerns and themes — loneliness, economic hardship and a world teetering on the brink. Zhao, also nominated for her screenplay and editing, worked closely with DP Joshua James Richards (also nominated), who says of her semi-improvisa- tional approach, "Chloé will edit in her head what we've shot for the day. She'll go home, she'll watch dailies, and she might call me in the morning and say, 'There's just one thing that I want to add.' It's not a conventional approach to coverage, and she's constantly finding the edit and finding the movie." Sound design and the music were also crucial to creating the ambitious road odyssey. Zhao says she "set out to look for music inspired by nature" and was drawn to Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi. "A big part of Fern's evolution is learning to live with nature," she explains. "Living in a van, she becomes increasingly more exposed to nature — its beau- ty and hostility, its ability to replenish and to heal." The sound design was tailored to the very different specific landscapes Fern travels through. For this, Zhao and her team worked with supervising sound editor/sound designer Sergio Diaz, who has collaborated with Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñarritu. For Nomadland, he part- nered with re-recording mixer Zach Seivers. "We wanted to keep the sound design true to the soundscapes of the places where Fern finds herself," explains Zhao. "Very much like the music, we didn't want to use 'tricks' in sound design to tell the audiences how and what to feel. We want- ed to be creative, experiential in our sound design, as well as true and honest." Visual effects were created by The Yard VFX. Feminist thriller/black comedy Promising Young Woman was shot in just 23 days, primarily on location in Los Angeles in 2019, by DP Benjamin Kracun (Beast) using special Panavision lenses to emphasize Fennell's stylized aesthet- ic and the palette of vivid colors. "It's a dark fairytale, so it was important that it had that heightened feeling," notes Fennell. The film was also nominated for its editing by Frédéric Thoraval (Taken), and was finished at Harbor Picture Company. V I S UA L E F F EC TS , E D I T I N G & S O U N D Oscar has always loved big, splashy VFX, and Christopher Nolan's Tenet — note the tell-tale palindromic title — features some of the year's most spectacular VFX, expertly deployed in the service of the film's central conceit — that time can flow backwards as well as forwards. To deal with this theory of 'inversion' and create mind-bending scenes where cars drive backwards and bullets fly back into their guns, Nolan reteamed with visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson, who worked on 2017's Dunkirk and earned an Oscar nomination for Mad Max: Fury Road, and his VFX team of David Lee, Andrew Lockley and Scott Fisher, all nominated for their work. Most mind-bending of all, perhaps, is the fact that Tenet reportedly has not 3,000 but under 300 VFX shots total. But each one was carefully crafted by Dneg for maximum impact. To create a building that both exploded and imploded at the same time, the team worked closely with the special effects team and first built two, one-third scale, 10-story buildings. Each one was then blown up — one at the top, the other at the base — and shot with matching cameras. The team then reversed the footage of just one sequence and com- posited the two buildings to achieve the illusion. For the forwards/backwards complexity of the tour-de-force car-chase se- quence, Jackson used a lot of previs to test run the logic of the action and to make sure it ultimately made sense. As for the impressive plane crash, the team used a combination of in-camera action, CG and VFX for clean-up. CG was also used to add helicopters, land mines and even missing masts in the boat sequences. George Clooney's The Midnight Sky used everything from the latest VR technology and zero gravity effects overseen by VFX supervisor Matthew Kasmir and his team of Christopher Lawrence, Max Solomon and David Watkins, all nominated. To create the zero gravity scenes, the team used a lot of previs and VFX work done by Framestore in London, who famously worked on the VFX Oscar-winner Gravity, and built a CG environment inside a game engine that was processed in realtime and tracked to the camera on set. They also used the latest facial performance capture technology, shooting actors with five cameras from different angles. The film also made extensive use of ILM's StageCraft system, first used on The Mandalorian. Stefan Sonnenfeld of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom Minari Borat Subsequent Moviefilm The Midnight Sky OSCAR CONTENDERS