DGA Monthly

M A Y 2 0 2 6 I 5 — continued on page 6 This shot is the moment — our first look at Diana, now fully adorned and emotionally ready to make her first move as our Wonder Woman. We hold — the stunned pause before the onslaught — still in slow motion. For the framing and look of this shot, I had in mind the grandiosity, grace, clouds, and beauty of the old Columbia Pictures logo's "Torch Lady." We tinted the background clouds with some of the warmth of magic hour light. Throughout the field I also added practical smoke to the ground that we tinted with cyan powder. We played with the tint of that smoke for a long time, finding just the right color to subtly wrap through the scene and juxtapose with the sky. It was a difficult balance to strike on a real location, but I knew that the grit, wind, and elements on the skin and hair would, as always, make a big difference to the drama of the scene. 3 This is the second important reveal of her powers as she realizes what she is capable of. Gal's performance tracks the exciting shift from the observation to that fixed look ahead, telling us it's "go time!" We had squibs on the bracelets and later on the shield for the sparks, and augmented them in post. The clouds in the sky and the explosions were all real, but we enhanced those, as well. That the costume is so minimal is great because, despite its lack of armor, she is still willing to take on the world by herself. But poor freezing Gal! If people knew what Actors can go through. We had many versions of the costume. Most of them had to be very sturdy things with a lot of corseting — which is fairly uncomfortable — so we switched it to something with more give and no rigging when we could. 5 The fun of this rapidly tracking, bullet POV shot is that it is a means to reveal and see unleashed the first of several of her thus far unforeseen powers. By taking the POV of the bullet, we clock that she can clearly see it — in super- slow motion — rapidly approaching. This is a fully live action move, with only the bullet in CG. The wire rig let the camera rush toward her, making it exciting and real in a way that VFX can sometimes struggle to do. Scoring the scene was very difficult. We needed a perfect, continually escalating, highly emotional and internal, yet driving and externally exciting piece. It was one of the first things we started working on. My Composer, Rupert Gregson-Williams, and I wanted to nail every second so, after the movie was complete, he wrote an entirely new track in a day or two, based on all we had learned. 4 We also had the suits made in every shade of bright and dark color saturation to punctuate whatever I was trying to say at that moment. For the glory moment reveal, after she first steps onto the battlefield, we used a fairly bright Wonder Woman suit, but then we shifted down to a less dazzling suit so we could focus on the action and drama. Lindy Hemming, our Costume Designer, is a genius artist. This is another shot we did on stage for all the same reasons as before. It really punctuates what matters in this scene — which is Diana's discovery — though throughout the mounting battle we check in with the soldiers on both sides to clock their reaction and retribution. Watching her build confidence and momentum is what really matters and why I chose to go low and isolate and stay with her, as her power escalated. 6

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