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smoke effects. "The big challenges were bringing a unique look to every environment, and life to all the characters," reports Stokdyk, who says the process took over a year. The team used Arnold renderers and Katana lighting packages, along with Maya "as a base for all the character work, and Houdini for most of the effects work," he adds. Summing up, he says that the VFX work, "was even more difficult than the stuff we did on the Spider-Man films, because it was all done on stage with a very classic stagelit look, while the Spider-Man films were all grounded in New York locations." Aussie VFX house Rising Sun Pictures worked on three of the year's most successful releases — Gravity, The Great Gatsby and The Wolverine. The Great Gatsby may seem like an unlikely candidate for 3D, but it suited director Baz Luhrmann's spectacular vision for his reworking of the famous F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Shot on Red Epic-Xs, the film also had an unorthodox approach to post and its VFX, with DIT Brook Willard working with data manager Steve Freebairn and the production's in-house VFX department to manage the workflow. Star Trek Into Darkness, shot by DP Daniel Mindel, whose credits include Mission Impossible 3 and Domino, featured hundreds of stunning VFX shots, created by an army of artists and technicians at Pixomondo, Stereo D, ILM, Halon Entertainment, Atomic Fiction and Kelvin Optical. The DI was done by Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3. Another army of artists and technicians at Weta Digital, Scanline VFX, Digital Domain, Stereo D, Method Studios, Trixter, The Embassy, Framestore, Fuel VFX, The Third Floor and Cinesite labored over the VFX in Iron Man 3, while MPC, Cinesite, Prime Focus World and ILM helped bring the zombies to life in another global blockbuster, World War Z. And many of the same houses — Weta, MPC, Scanline and Double Negative, along with Gentle Giant Studios and Legend 3D, helped make Superman fly again in Man of Steel. And busy Weta was the sole VFX house on The Hobbit. 3D may have taken some knocks recently, but two high-profile films — Gravity and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug — proved that if you use the 3D correctly, audiences will come. To create the stunning photorealism of Gravity, which looks like the frontrunner, acclaimed Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron assembled a behind-the-scenes team that included multiple Oscar-nominated director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men, The New World), editor Mark Sanger (VFX editor on Children of Men) and Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisor Tim Webber (The Dark Knight). "You have to design in 3D from the very start if you're going to do it properly," he says. "When you don't, you don't exploit all the possibilities and it's usually lame and visually jarring. And often projection isn't very good either. Here, we created a 3D experience from start to finish, which is totally different and the right way to use 3D." Post production was also front and center from the very start of the 3D hit thriller. "We actually needed to complete post before we even started pre production," reports Cuaron. "We had to do very precise animation for the whole film, with perfect lighting and rendering. Then some of the rendering started every scene's prep work." And even though the director started on post work early for such VFX-driven films as franchise blockbuster Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he admits that front-loading post production and VFX (all done at Londonbased Framestore) onto a complex shoot like Gravity is the new normal. "I'd never gone through a post experience like this before," he states. "It was totally unconventional. It was also quite scary, because we developed all the technology and had these prototypes, and it was all theoretical. It wasn't until we had all the final rendering — maybe three years into the process — that we finally knew that the theory worked." It's no exaggeration to say that the film is one big VFX shot. "There's not one frame without VFX," reports Cuaron. "Some are incredibly complicated, and some are less so. Tim, the DP and myself conceptually created all the technology to do it, and Tim is a genius — not just with technology, but he's also an artist. So Tim was very involved right from the start through the four-plus years, creating the technology and figuring out just how to achieve every moment we aimed for. So he was on the set and also working with the actors, to make sure it all went smoothly, because the lighting dictated the technology and vice versa. And in addition to Framestore he brought in Rising Sun Pictures and Nhance to do some shots." The DI "was crucial" and the "last big link in the whole chain," he adds. "Emmanuel's worked for so long with Steve Scott at Technicolor in LA and Steve came to London to work on it for a while, and then we completed it in LA" Writer/director/producer Peter Jackson and his team, including senior VFX supervisor Joe Letteri, returned to Middle-earth for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second of the 3D trilogy set 60 years before the Lord of the Rings blockbusters (see Post's exclusive interview with Letteri in the Dec 2012 issue). Letteri, whose credits include The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Man of Steel, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men: The Last Stand, reports that post was all done at Weta Digital, with over 2,000 shots and an 800-strong VFX crew over a two year period. "Basically, on films like these you start post on Day 1 as there's so much involved," he notes. Editing was once again done by Jabez Olssen. While Gravity and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, may be an extreme example, all films with a heavy VFX component now routinely start post at the same time as pre production. Director Justin Lin, who's been driving the Fast & Furious mega-franchise since 2006's Tokyo Drift, and who's become the go-to car-chase and car-stunt filmmaker of his generation, did exactly that with his Fast & Furious 6, the latest blockbuster episode of the long-running action franchise. Ask him how early he had to integrate post into the shoot, and he notes, "Right from the start of the entire project. The post aspect was crucial and we integrated that very early on. Right after storyboard I went to pre-vis, so I immediately get the editors on to start cutting it, as I need everyone to be on the same page." While The Lone Ranger re-teamed uber- www.postmagazine.com The Wolf of Wall Street was mainly shot on film, but relied on Arri's Alexa for VFX and night scenes. continued on page 45 Post • January 2014 19