Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1536119
12 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 2 not having generative AI moods, he immediately detected what he called "the 7-finger plastic look" in almost all of them anytime some- one tried. What he wanted was a human actually thinking about the specific moments and putting their touch on it early on—their own interpretation and contribution, to elevate the moment—before we shot a single frame. Those artworks became the blueprint for a lot of our work. James put a flow chart together in Excel for what happens in Remmick's death and how the different departments overlap. We had meetings with stunts, special effects makeup, and everyone else, and split up the work with still a lot of overlap for interdepart- mental handshakes—and that's what I think makes a lot of that real- ly successful. Most of the work wasn't an aerthought. I always felt it was going to be around 700 shots, but it ended up being more than 1,000. The cotton fields, Remmick's death, train station, surreal montage, digital scars, vampire eyes, and more. We had real contact lenses for the vampire eyes, but there was a desire to have every single vampire have eye effects—and scenes with sig- nificant movement were tricky to do with the contacts, as they se- verely limited the actor's vision—so we created digital replicas based on material ingest scans. Then, obviously, the twinning—the VFX work Sinners would not work without. For moments with lots of physical touch and inter- activity, we developed some new technology called the HaloRig, pi- oneered because none of the technology that we found was good enough to do a full head replacement for Michael [B. Jordan] in 65mm, whenever we shot with the body double. At the same time, we pushed really hard to shoot real Michael as much as possible, in- cluding in that cigarette handoff shot that a lot of people seem to be talking about. Some shots are simple split screens, others are highly sophisticated multipass composites shot with a repeatable Technodolly crane, operated by Ron Tatham, involving complicated syncing and preparation with sound and VTR [video tape recorder] departments. We were having tons of conversations to get everyone on board. That's where the shorthand really comes in—that we know Ruth Carter [costume designer], that we know Hannah Beachler [pro- duction designer], that we know Autumn, as well as everyone else on the crew. And those relationships extended all the way into post. When it came to designing the train station, it ended up being a digital set extension occupying two-thirds of the frame—including a digital train rolling on digital tracks, replacing a smoke machine on dolly tracks that we used to engulf waiting passengers with practical smoke. We sent our initial concepts to Hannah to get her input on building a digital city. "How would you do it? Give us feedback." She was like, "Annotating there, you have this sign there, the color of this needs to be different…" It was a really intricate collaboration. Same with Ruth. There was a prop piece that needed to be designed. We went back and asked, "Tell us how you would do that?" The same with special effects makeup. There was a constant dialogue, and I am a strong believer that just because we can basically do almost everything with our VFX tool kit, doesn't mean we should. We were also trying to connect special effects from on set with the people doing the same work in post, to get them to talk to each other. That was a really important thing for Autumn, to make sure that what we talk about on set also makes it all the way through to Ryan Coogler & DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw on set.