Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/246736
O S C A R [ Cont.from 19 ] producer Jerry Bruckheimer, director Gore Verbinski and shape-shifting Pirates of the Caribbean star Johnny Depp (who also bonded with the director on the 2011 Oscar-winner Rango), it didn't get much love at the box office. But the impressive VFX, by ILM, MPC, Hydraulx, Lola and Gentle Giant among others, might get an Oscar nod. And the hybrid movie — it was a combination of film (about 70 percent) and digital (30 percent) — has some interesting post angles. Dailies were scanned immediately into 4K and were also graded by Company 3 who did the DI. "It was a great set up, as we had the look we wanted generated in camera, and that was then carried on throughout our dailies and into post and the telecine," says DP Bojan Bazelli. "And it was the same thing with our digital dailies. We'd shoot our digital files, make a copy on-set to be safe, and then the original drives would be sent by courier to Company 3 where they'd copy it again and grade it." The team used a Codex Digital recorder to record the ArriRaw files, which the DP says has "the most latitude of all the options." Rush may get attention for its spectacular visual effects, courtesy of Double Negative. Howard worked closely with VFX supervisor Jody Johnson, and reports that Rush used, "about 700 VFX shots in the end, of varying types. A lot were just brush strokes and rig removal stuff, but we also had our big moments where cars are crashing and then things where it's just too dangerous and too expensive and unpredictable to try and do any other way except with VFX. So I couldn't have made this film and have it look the way it does with all the visual effects." Like Rush, writer/director Neill Blomkamp's second film, Elysium, was a box office disappointment, but it deserves Oscar attention for its VFX. Image Engine in Vancouver, who did all the aliens in Blomkamp's District 9, did all the VFX for Elysium — "870 which is a lot, but not that much compared to Pacific Rim or The Hobbit or Avatar, where you're talking thousands of VFX," notes the director. "Image Engine are so good at integrating characters over live action performance. It's rotomation, so the animators copy the essence of the actor, and then do the background restoration where they paint him out." The really difficult VFX was creating the Torus space station. "With both my films I have a very particular way in which the VFX work, which is that I try to give the VFX artists as much of a leg up as I can — meaning very clear light direction with sunlight, everything is embedded in the camera, the actor is there for reference so you can replace him," he adds. "And with Elysium, most of the film is like that, but then suddenly you're cutting to a 100 percent digital render of the manicured inside of the space station, and that was very challenging to do." Technicolor–PostWorks New York provided conform and digital intermediate color grading for Lee Daniels' The Butler. Daniels is a longtime client of the facility which provided similar services for Daniels' films Precious and The Paperboy. Inside Llewyn Davis, shot on 35mm by Bruno Delbonnel, is the latest film from directors Joel and Ethan Coen, and Technicolor-PostWorks provided an advanced dailies workflow and final color grading under the guidance of Technicolor super- P I C K S World War Z is but one film from 2013 that took a hybrid approach, using live action and animated techniques. vising digital colorist Peter Doyle. ANIMATION It's also been another strong year for animated features, both creatively and at the box office, with several likely contenders, including Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Monsters University, Despicable Me 2, The Croods, Epic, The Smurfs 2, Frozen, Turbo, Planes, Free Birds and Wind Rises, likely the last film from Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki. For The Croods' writer/directors Kirk DeMicco and Chris Sanders, the big challenge was bringing a prehistoric world to life. "Neither of us realized just how much work was involved, as everything from a leaf to a rock had to be built and surfaced," reports Sanders. "We had no shortcuts, and there are no structures — it's all the natural world." It took the team of 300 artists "over four years" to complete the task, says DeMicco, and they used "every tool at our disposal, from oldschool matte painting to the latest technology." For the sequels and prequels — Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Monsters University, Despicable Me 2, The Smurfs 2 — the big challenge was keeping the magic fresh. "You're faced with a real dilemma — audiences want the familiarity of the same characters, but at the same time, they don't want just a repeat of the first film," acknowledges Pixar's Dan Scanlon, director of Monsters University. Scanlon worked with a team of 200 for nearly five years on Monsters University. "You're always aware of the pressure to do better than the original," he adds. "And it's really tough as those characters were specifically designed to tell one story, which has now been told. So you have to design a whole new story and journey, and also make sure that there's a new emotional change. It can't be the same as the first movie, and sequels often fall into that trap." Indeed, critically and financially successful movie sequels are notoriously hard to pull off, and in the world of animation, for every inspired Toy Story 2 success, there are plenty that have crashed and burned (Cars 2). Revisiting characters and their worlds — and keeping them fresh — is a tricky balancing act, even for Pixar. Similarly, for Kris Pearn and Cody Cameron, the returning directors of the 2009 surprise hit Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the big challenge facing Cloudy 2 was "not to repeat ourselves in both the types of jokes and the character stories," says Pearn. On the plus side, the team didn't have to sell the concept this time out. "The studio had a lot of reservations about Cloudy 1 as it was so Muppetty and cartoony with this whole crazy world," he recalls. "We spent a year out of the four-year process just trying to convince them it'd work." The team also decided to flip the original's "disaster movie" genre. "This time we went for the monster movie, which gave us all this new energy, and took the sentient food idea — which made the least sense in the first film — and ran with it," explains Pearn. So far so good. But what about the use of animation in such features as Gravity, Oz The Great and Powerful, Iron Man 3 and World War Z — and what do these strikingly diverse films all have in common? Despite their very different artistic visions, subject matter and tone, they're all part of one of the hottest trends in Hollywood — the hybrid production that seamlessly blends live-action and animation techniques, enabling their creators to boldly go where no filmmaker has yet gone. But while this hybrid approach is golden at the box office, the increasing blurring of the lines between live action and animation is also calling into question what exactly constitutes an animated film these days. Gravity is obviously not "cartoony" in the way that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Monsters University and Despicable Me 2 are, but Cuaron happily describes his four-year labor of love as, "like making an animated movie." Says Sanders, "I feel that today, live action films are finally catching up in a lot of ways with where animation was born. Animated films have always had these incredibly fanciful realms." Adds Oz The Great and Powerful's senior VFX supervisor Scott Stokdyk, "We're now creating in VFX the virtual equivalent of the entire live action production — and it's a trend that'll keep growing.... So yes, it's getting harder and harder to define exactly what an animated film is now." Audiences will have to stay tuned.