Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1547068
j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 6 c g w 9 intuitive process. When it comes to visual effects scenes, my role was really to give him the best sense of the action, of that chaos, even though sometimes it would involve creatures that were just not there physically. So I had to give him the tools to be able to respect his way of creating movies, and not interfere or force him into some- thing very rigid that would have contradicted his own visual style. So we did extensive previs, but more as a map for all of the depart- ments to understand what we were doing. It's always very informa- tive for the director of photography, the production designer, and the assistant directors that have to schedule the day. We can look at the previs and say, "Okay, this is going to be on location. This shot is going be on blue screen. This shot's going to deal with stunts." We can try and make sense of how we're going to shoot it. But at the end of the day, the final product is very different from the previs. How did you capture such an authentic emotional bond be- tween Brad Pitt and his canine companion during production? François Dumoulin: Our initial assumption was that we were going to try and capture as much as possible in camera with the real dog. The real dogs, actually, because it's not just one dog—we had four of them. Uber was the father of the litter, and he's the hero dog in terms of look, performance, and range of emotions. Uber was extremely good as being the main character. He had his own presence, his own personality. The three other dogs were his kids: Ryker, Seeka, and Hondo. Each of them was chosen with a specific kind of scenario in mind. One was particularly good at fetching. One was really good at running. One was good at swimming. Each of them was trained with specific scenes in mind. We would usually start with the dog that we had chosen for the scene. If that dog would not cooperate, was not in the mood, or whatever, we would shi dogs. We knew there would be some scenes that the dog would not be able to perform because they were just too dangerous or too vio- lent. I'm thinking in particular about the tree bridge crossing and the wolf attack. We knew we would need a digital dog for those scenes. Again, that's really the reason why Framestore was chosen as the main vendor in the first place. We knew we had to do a complete perfect match of the real dog in CGI, and that was Framestore's main mandate when they joined the show. Knowing that we had a CG asset of that dog, that kind of opened up the potential for more than just those scenes. When I was on set with the director, there's a few moments where we were not really able to get the right performance from the dog. I was there to just open up the door to replace the dog with a CG asset or augment the dog. When you look at the final product, there's about 100 shots, I would say, that required some modification, transformation, or complete replacement of our dog. Hopefully, it's something that the audience will never notice. But the range goes from: it's a real dog but we did a little bit of a retime or a little 2D touch-up on his face, to completely replacing the dog altogether with a CG asset. But for every scene, we always tried to capture something with a real dog. Even though sometimes the dog would not cooperate, at least we always had a fantastic reference. As I mentioned, there are a few shots that were designed with a CG dog in mind from the get-go. But there were also moments when