Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542296
T E C H P H OT O : F X Before and after visual effects shots from "Alien Earth." 56 C I N E M O N T A G E T E C H allow the audience to see what Joe Hermit was seeing, to understand his experience of the situation. Cote said, "There's also that moment where the camera tilts up to reveal the building, and a piece of it falls and smashes into the camera. There's a cut there. Debris smashes into the engine, and smoke billows up; there's a cut there. We ended up using those devices to compress this sequence. That was a very long, iter- ative process to get the handoff between the practical plate and the CG. Everything below the characters' waists (what's on the ground), the bus, the building entrance, and the parked truck were practical, so they're in the background plate. Everything else — the entire Maginot ship, and the entire top of the building — was manufactured. That took a lot of dialing in." Cote noted that for some scenes, they did live virtual-reality animation — a pro- cess he first experienced while working on "The Creator." He said, "Director Gareth Ed- wards did a session at ILM where they shot tons of live animation for the space station scene (a lot of which didn't make it into the cut) using a VR headset. We got that back in the cutting room and used that to build all our temp sequences. We did that as well on 'Alien: Earth,' through a different vendor, UPP in Prague. We'd have a remote VR session led by our visual effects supervisor, Jonathan, and we'd set up some sequences in the crash scene that were difficult to nail down exactly. Jonathan would move the virtual camera around in the frame — up, down, in, out, change the lens, try moving from here to there, move backward, and so on. They output four or five iterations of that, and we'd make a library for Regis, who'd then decide which ones to use and where in the cut." T h e p o s t - p ro d u c t i o n te a m w o r k e d remotely on "Alien: Earth," since, according to Cote, that's Kimble's preference. "We stuck with that model with no exceptions," he said. When working remotely, Cote mainly uses his own gear. His studio has an iMac with three monitors (one supplied by the editorial rental company Atlas Digital) running Jump Desktop, which remotes into an Avid Media Composer Ultimate work- station (physically located somewhere in Burbank) with a full suite of visual effects industry-standard plugins, like Boris FX Sapphire. "Everybody on the show has the same plugins. So when the assistants or I do temps, it all works properly, no matter what system we're using," noted Cote. His standing desk has two keyboard