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OSCAR PICKS www.postmagazine.com 21 POST JAN/FEB 2026 shoot with the Arri Alexa 35. "When we knew that we were going to shoot digital, that was the only option for me," says the DP. "Because of its dynamic range, we could use natural light, real fire and candles." Veloso didn't work on a LUT with a colorist. "I usually just go with the regular LUT, then later in post, when we're grading, I feel it gives a general sense of how colors really behave. And I'm always trying to keep that and bring more texture and make it more interesting." The shoot "was very hard, as it was a really tight schedule," he reports. "We had just six weeks for a period movie with a lot of scenes, plus a lot of big action scenes with stunts, extras and choreography. And we were moving a lot and shooting in so many different and remote places that took a long time to get to. Clint was reworking the script the whole time to see what he could cut or rearrange, so we could shoot faster." The hardest scenes to shoot were the two big fire scenes, he reports. "The first is a huge fire in the forest seen from Grainier's perspective, and of course we couldn't burn a real forest, so it took amazing work by the lighting department and the SFX departments to make it look real. And then in post we added some VFX." For the second big fire sequence seen through Gladys' perspective, the team shot on a volume stage in Seattle, "because of what we wanted to do with the shutter speed to get that dream-like quality," Veloso explains. Grading was done at Bleach in Sao Paulo with colorist Sergio Pasqualino, the DP's longtime col- laborator from Brazil. "We've been working together for years," Veloso, shares. "He also did Jockey, and he does an amaz- ing job in the DI of just bringing texture and finding the right levels and bringing colors, but without manipulating it in a way where everything feels manipulated or painted. It's just natural." The Secret Agent is another small film that's been getting a lot of Oscar buzz. Helmed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, who won Best Director at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival where it premiered, it's both a love letter to cinema and a subversive genre thriller. Set in Recife, Brazil, in 1977, it tells the story of Marcelo, a technology researcher who sud- denly finds himself an unwitting target in the brutal dictatorship's political purge. "We did post in France, Holland and Germany," Filho told me. "We did the sound mix and most of the VFX in France, the stop-motion animation and music in Holland, and the grade in Germany, so it was a true international co-production." Filho and cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova set out to create a visual style that blends vivid energy with the darkness of its political backdrop. "The goosebumps that you get are from wit- nessing the acts of violence in the plain sunlight, or how the illustrations of a corrupt regime are accompanied by the rhythm of samba," notes Alexandrova, who used bright and vibrant colors, along with energetic camera movements. She shot with the Arri Alexa 35 and worked with colorist Dirk Meier on a LUT to create both the raw energy and lush brilliance of the film's visuals. "We wanted to create an analog look without pretending to have shot on film," says Alexandrova. The team used vintage anamorphic Panavision lenses, zooms and split diopter shots." To capture the anarchy of Carnival in a pivotal scene where Marcelo learns of the serious danger he is in, the team planned out a carefully-choreo- graphed sequence that involved over 200 people on the street as Marcelo walks out of a movie and joins the frenzied celebration. "The whole scene was shot in one 15-minute take with the camera I operated, starting inside the cinema, dolly-riding out with the character, and then moving up high above the crowd," Alexandrova shares. VISUAL EFFECTS & POST WORKFLOW The VFX category boasts a very diverse and strong field — Avatar: Fire and Ash, F1, Sinners, Jurassic World: Rebirth and The Lost Bus, with the third film in the epic Avatar franchise looking like the one to beat. The sci-fi epic adventure is stuffed full of awesome VFX, and to create the immersive battles and dazzling aerial & underwater sequenc- es, James Cameron reunited with Weta's VFX su- per Joe Letteri, whose work on Avatar won him the Oscar, and two-time Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor/virtual second-unit director Richard Baneham. ILM also did some VFX. The film has "over 3,500 VFX shots," Cameron says. "I try to pack the frame, so the lighting, the cinematography, the selective depth of field, selective focus and everything in it is orchestrated so that there's a beautiful flow from cut to cut in the action. The VFX process went very smoothly as we've worked together for a long time. Most of the Weta people working at the supervisory level were on Avatar 1 and 2, while at ILM, I worked with a relatively new team this time, but they did a great job. They were coming up to speed on the char- Frankenstein received nine Oscar nominations.