Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1515786
49 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E T E C H led by Michael Gaspar had light rigs on most weapons and o-camera interactive light- ing rigs. They worked hand in glove with visual eects supervisor Marcus Taormina during production. So we were using the practical flashes from those rigs to guide placement of our temp visual eects." Temp visual eects are helpful early on for storytelling and timing, and for prepar- ing scenes for turnover to the visual eects department because they indicate where actions are supposed to happen — for exam- ple, muzzle flashes during the shootout on Gondival. Zhang was tasked with cutting in visual eects elements like muzzle flashes and blood splatters using tools in the AVID, such as SpectraMatte to key out the green, and visual effects plug-ins from Boris FX, like Sapphire. Some of the visual effects elements came from pre-existing libraries a n d o t h e rs ca m e f ro m t h e s e t . " Eve r y few weeks, they'd spend a day shooting elements — like actual explosions and fire, dust particles, and blowing sand and dirt," Zhang said. "When the ship from Mother- world lands in the village on Veldt, they shot a helicopter landing and taking o on set so that it would look real. It's not fake; it's real elements they shot on set. A lot of those elements are practical." According to Dorn, there were more practical set pieces than one would initially imagine for a fantasy sci-fi film. They built an entire set for the village on Veldt; they built a Dropship, and a large portion of Kai's freighter. "We had an actual Dropship, although it had to be modified in post de- pending on which side it was representing (sometimes they have different colors or dierent emblems). We had a ton of prac- tical explosions, which blew my mind. And the character Jimmy (a sentient combat machine from a bygone era) was shot as a live-action performance and later CGI-en- hanced or replaced with 100% CGI to create Jimmy the robot," she added. THE TAMING OF THE BENNU One of the most challenging scenes in "Part One: A Child of Fire" involved a char- acter named Tarak attempting to tame a grin-like creature called a bennu by taking it for a ride. To get the shots, they had actor Staz Nair (as Tarak) riding on a mechanical seat while a camera on a crane moved around him. For the bennu, they shot a man in a green suit carrying a green bird head. It was the roughest idea of a scene that evolved into one of the most spectacular in the final film. Early in the shoot, Dorn edited the bennu scene and then spent time on set working with Snyder and Taormina during their lunch break to refine it for turnover to the visual eects vendor. Zhang explained, "We knew it was going to take a long time to finesse the bennu and its movements. We started turning over those shots a month after the shoot started, which is insane. But the editing and visual eects were so co-dependent in this case because without seeing the animation, the scene is hard for Dody to edit, but without the editing, visual eects can't move forward. So we'd bounce a pass of Dody's edit over to visual eects and they would bounce back a version of the animated scene. Dody would revise the edit and we'd send it back to visual eects. This happened over and over until it's the scene we have now." During the time it took for the visual effects to get more refined, one element that helped to tell the story — to commu- nicate the action in the bennu scene — was sound. Ciccotello's sound effects sold the idea of Tarak flying through the air with wind rushing through the bennu's feathers. Sound can help mentally fill in gaps and gloss over what's lacking visually until the visual eects are complete. "With heavy visual effects shows, you are often controlled by the visual effects schedule. As the editor, I'm always a bit beholden to that," said Dorn. "I wish that I could just play in a sandbox and do what- ever I wanted, but that's not how it works. And because we had the two movies going at once, we couldn't have scenes colliding at the same vendor. The producers worked diligently with the vendors to create a manageable schedule, always tracking what were the most dicult shots and sequences, and what needed to be turned over first. We had three main visual eects vendors: WETA, Scanline, and Framestore with help from several other vendors including Luma, OPSIS, Rodeo, and more," said Dorn. "It is a lot of work on our end," Castillón said. "We would get about three hours of dailies every day; we shot for 152 days. So we were making sure that continuities and everything are constantly being updated, and we were very clear on how we labeled everything. We're keeping it flowing like a well-oiled machine." "As an assistant," said Ciccotello, "it re- minded me more of working on a season of TV, where you're often working on multiple episodes in various stages simultaneously. It was a wild ride." ■ Carlos Castillon. Skylar Zhang.