Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1547068
and training them for the scenes of the movie. Our project only had two months of prep time. The minute the project was greenlit, we had to hit the ground run- ning. I flew to New Zealand in January 2025 and we started shoot- ing in March 2025. It was a very compressed schedule for prepara- tion for a film of that ambition. Knowing that you're also going to be shooting in the wild on location comes with a lot of uncertainties. It's much harder for visual effects to prep for a location shoot than it is to prep for shooting on a sound stage, for instance. There were a lot of moving pieces. We had to move fast, and all of that created an atmosphere of urgency—which is something I really respond well to. Preparation is usually the moment where you try to lock method- ologies and how you want to approach and integrate visual effects in the production process. Our preparation time was very condensed, but I still tried to follow my own process. I like to work from the script, look at the first pass of storyboards if possible, and then move those storyboards into an animatic, a previs. If I have the luxury of time, I even like to do techvis, where you start planning your exact shots— where the camera is going to be, et cetera. Given the very limited time we had, I had to rush to do some first-pass previs. Just to get a sense of what the language would be, because that was my first time working with David Ayer. I had to get a grip of his visual style and how he wanted to approach those scenes. "David likes to surround himself with a certain amount of chaos, and grab it and wrangle it..." We couldn't storyboard and previs the entire movie, so we had to focus on the big visual effects scenes. There are three sequences in particular that I really spent time developing during pre-production and planning the way we were going to shoot them: the plane crash that is the big incident at the beginning of the movie, the scene where our characters have to cross a tree bridge over a dangerous river, and the wolf attack, which is the climax of the second act. Those three scenes were the ones that I really tried to prep for the most because they had many challenges. There were just a million ways of shooting them and failing at them potentially. One thing that I quickly realized was that David Ayer was not really interested in doing extensive previs. Every director is different. Some directors will follow a very linear path where they want to previs ev- erything and do concept art for everything. When you see the final frames in the movie, it's basically the concept art in motion. David doesn't want to work like that at all. He doesn't just sit at video vil- lage and look at the monitor and give notes. He likes to operate the camera himself. He wants to be in the middle of the action while it's happening and react to it. I think David likes to surround himself with a certain amount of chaos, and grab it and wrangle it. He has a very 8 8 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 6