Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/246736
OSCAR PICKS 12 Years a Slave went for authenticity, shooting in Louisiana during the heat of summer. audio software on my laptop, such as Metasynth — a great tool for looping atmospheres or extending the length of a chord. Everyone said it's crazy to film in Louisiana in July, it gets hot. And there we were, well into August. That translates to the screen. Solomon is constantly engaged in gruelling physical labour and sweat pours from him in gallons. Everyone was eaten alive by insects. Kirk Francis, our sound recordist, stayed behind after the shoot to capture the sound of cicadas at different times of the day. They make an incredible noise in the evenings, a kind of circular buzz-saw pattern. It's deafening — technically loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss. We used those recordings in the sequence where Solomon is left dangling from a noose in the middle of Ford's plantation, and they build like a music cue during the section where Michael Fassbender's character, Epps, discovers his fields have been devastated by cotton worm. My background was as a composer and sound editor, so I spend a ridiculous amount of time finessing these things. There are a lot of long takes in Steve's films, but they never feel slow. There's a carefully-managed tension. By not cutting, the audience has no choice but to invest in what they are watching, there are no safety ropes, no hand-holding. It's kind to the actors, and it has the wonderful side benefit for me that when the cuts do come, the rhythm is crystal clear, and I can make a huge impact with them." As McQueen now lives in Amsterdam, 16 Post • January 2014 the team moved their gear there for 10 weeks of fine cutting. Returning to the States, they moved first to New Orleans and then to Los Angeles for screenings and post work, including Hans Zimmer's score and Leslie Shatz's sound mix at Wildfire Studios. The film was scanned with Arri scanners and color timed at Company 3 by Tom Poole on DaVinci Resolve. In such acclaimed films as The Departed (which won him the Oscar), Gangs of New York, Casino and Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese has examined the morally-corrupt lifestyles of the rich and infamous — the made men and gangsters that ran criminal empires and built Las Vegas while destroying the lives of anyone who got in the way. So maybe it was just a matter of time before he switched his attention to the machinations of stock brokers — another group fond of big numbers, sharp suits and the challenges of walking a very thin line between legal and illegal business. The Wolf of Wall Street, his aptly-named new film and dark comedy was shot by Mexican DP Rodrigo Prieto, whose credits include Argo, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Babel, Alexander and Brokeback Mountain (for which he won an Oscar nomination).The DP states that, contrary to some published reports, the film was not an all-digital shoot. "Our original plan was to shoot digitally," he admits, "but Marty preferred the look of film, especially on the close ups." But because the film also uses "quite a lot" of visual effects, www.postmagazine.com and VFX supervisor Robert Legato had already budgeted all the effects for digital capture, the "all-film" plan was adjusted. "It was far simpler for Rob to pull the keys and greenscreen, and change anything he had to in the edit without rescanning the negative if we stayed digital for the VFX," says Prieto. "So then we decided to shoot all the VFX scenes — and the greenscreen scenes in particular — with the Alexa. And once we'd decided that, I just thought, let's use the Alexa for what it's so good at — night scenes and lowlight situations." The DP and director settled on a hybrid approach, "the same thing I did on Argo, says Prieto; 80 percent of The Wolf of Wall Street was shot on film, and 20 percent was shot digitally, reports the DP. For the digital work he shot with the Alexa Studio. In terms of the digital workflow, the DP used a Codex Digital recorder to record the ArriRaw files, "which gives you the most latitude," and used LUTs with the DIT, "to emulate film print stock," he explains. The team also worked closely on the look with Deluxe in New York, where the film was finished at Efilm with colorist Yvan Lucas, Prieto's regular colorist and collaborator since Alexander. The film was cut by Scorsese's longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, and Philip Stockton was the supervising sound editor. When British director Paul Greengrass, whose credits include the Oscar-winning The Bourne Ultimatum, United 93 and Green Zone, teamed up with two-time Oscar-winner Tom