Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/161463
Blind Wink and we used PIX, sending files to them and reviewing cuts and sending notes back and forth while we shot. It was a great set up for us." POST: Talk about working with your VFX supervisor, Tim Alexander, and ILM, who did all three Pirates movies and Rango with you. VERBINSKI: "I wanted to put a similar team back together for this, although this is a very different beast.Tim was on from the very start, tackling all the train scenes in the opening act and finale, which are probably the most complex sequences in the entire film. So I'd previs a sequence, and then we'd discuss exactly how we were going to do it. We had a mantra, which was, 'Everything in a shot has to be 50 percent real at a minimum. So if we had two guys on the roof of a boxcar and we're actually driving down a road, we kept the actors and entire background, and then painted out the road so that 90 percent of the frame is real, with extensions. That was our approach as opposed to creating total CG environments. That was our last resort. "Big sequences, like the finale, were massive puzzles that were tackled throughout the shoot. There were actually shots in it from week one that had to be cut together with material we only got four months later, for a variety of reasons, and the sequence also takes you from the desert to the foothills and trees and through tunnels and so on, so there was a lot of topography changes too. "Sometimes we had four train cars on two different rigs and we'd tow them double-wide, and keep the environments real rather than be limited by what a real train track could give us. All that had to be integrated with all the VFX and post work, so it was incredibly complex. Ultimately we had over 2,000 VFX in the movie, a huge amount, and you always wish you could do some stuff over again, but we got them all done in the end." POST: The post process and VFX must have progressed quite a bit since you did the first Pirates movie. VERBINSKI: "It's amazing how fast all the technology's changing, especially in terms of post. I always wanted to have more of an open format in post and keep it more fluid in the way you edit and incorporate all the VFX and sound and music and so on. It's getting more like that, which is a good thing. In the old days, post was this thing you did at the end of a movie, to finish it, but as I was saying earlier, now you really have to incorporate it from the very start — even in the writing and early design and planning stages. "For big movies like this one, it's becoming this mash-up of techniques and ideas, so that you can mix live action and animation with influences from gaming and so on, which I think is pretty exciting, and it's really impacting the way movies are being made now." POST: The DI must have been important. Where did you do it? VERBINSKI: "At Company 3 with colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld, who worked with me on Rango and Pirates, and it was very important because the narrative is epic and almost operatic, and we didn't want to shoot on stages and fabricate the whole thing. I didn't want it to look too lush, so we went with a rawer version of the bleach bypass, to keep it honest and real-looking. Stefan Company 3's Stefan Sonnenfeld performed the film's DI. did a great job of blending all the film and digital footage together to give the movie a seamless look." POST: Did the film turn out the way you hoped it would? VERBINSKI: "I think so, and it really helped that we spent so much time planning it all out and on preproduction and on integrating all the post from day one. Just getting the screenplay right took about 18 months, plus all the storyboards and previs. Then we spent a lot of time — about 10 months — scouting all the locations, and you come up with this wish list of where you'd like to shoot, and then deal with the reality of where you can actually afford to shoot and where's practical when you have a massive crew and cast to move around. So you have to make smart choices continually." POST: So what's next? VERBINSKI: "I probably need to do something much smaller after all these huge movies, because they're so taxing and exhausting to make. But you have to remind yourself of what a privilege it is to be able to even make something like The Lone Ranger, where you have this five-mile, full-scale toy train set to play with, and all the horses and stunts and so on. It's pretty amazing when you walk on the set and see all this stuff. "I always loved westerns, and I always remember as a kid seeing old movies and scenes where some guy jumps from a train onto a horse, and made it look so easy. So you tend to get a bit cavalier about it, until you're actually trying to shoot it, and then it hits you just how dangerous it is. The movie's full of stuff like that." www.postmagazine.com Editors Craig Wood and James Haygood cut the film at Blind Wink. Post • August 2013 13