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September 2014

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www.postmagazine.com 17 POST SEPTEMBER 2014 VISUAL EFFECTS really makes a big difference. I'm not sure, but I think he might have shot on [Arri's] Alexa. It was definitely shot digitally and in 3D. Of course, we still had to convert our environments. We didn't render our environments in 3D in terms of a left and right eye. We'd just render a left eye and then converted the environments to the right eye, which is very common." Why is that an easier approach? "Because we didn't have to convert all those elements and different layers, so that certainly made it much easier for the 3D conversion. You can combine all of the passes." As a freelancer, is it tough to get up to speed on a studio's workflow? "It's kind of interesting to come into a facility and work with them. Of course I got to know everyone in Vancouver very well, and at night — because India is 12-and-a-half hours ahead — Mumbai. I'd use CineSync and Skype to review all of the work they were doing there." How was the work distributed between the Vancouver and India facilities? "In India, they were doing all the model- ing. A lot of assets have to be built — CG cars, buildings, roads, backgrounds. A lot of the modeling happened in India and also the layout. Basically, taking the greenscreen photography and putting in the final action. Eighty percent of the shots were completed in India. There were two other outsourced vendors that were hired. "In Vancouver, the 20 percent of the work that was being done was the more complex stuff — explosions, cars blowing up and things like that, that were all com- puter-generated. Also, exteriors of them driving by in car, they were all comput- er-generated with digital doubles in the car — of course CG cars. Any wide shot that you see, where you don't specifically focus on the actors, was done all CG." Were the VFX created in color or B&W? "We did render everything in color. Of course the grade was applied to the greenscreen photography and then the backgrounds were also desaturated to match the black & white grade. It was all integrated, so it wasn't a separate process." The color process is being done as you go along? "Yes, because it's the way you want to look at the work — the way it's ultimately gonna be. Also, because of the way we're able to control aspects. The only thing left in color was some of the neon signs in the background and the city environments." Did you do any character work? "Some. Marv always had the prosthetics on his face. [We did] CG doubles, but not characters. That's not the idea here. "Bruce Willis had the white scar on the top of his head and we retained the whiteness and punched it up a little more. And Nancy cuts her face at some point in the film to make herself ugly, and cuts her hair. So those were all enhance- ments to the makeup done on-set." What was the review process with Robert Rodriguez? "We would work and usually do two reviews a week with him. He's very busy. We would do a conference call and use CineSync. That's basically the review process. We'd look at all the work and play through a sequence, and he would make comments. I'd explain to him what was at what state, and what I needed to know at this point. It was simple. It wasn't an elaborate, hour-long discussion. It was short and to the point." Were certain scenes more challenging than others? "They were all [challenging] because they are doing the whole movie [with VFX]. There were certain locations — in the club, for instance — I think there were five dance sequences, and Nancy, who is Jessica Alba's character, is on-stage dancing. The nightclub that they're in is also in the first film, but he wanted it to look different and an updated [version] of that set. Trying to make that look like it was the same club from the first film, where she works as a dancer, and Marv — that's Mickey Rourke — hangs out a lot, that was certainly quite challenging. "And then going into other locations to make differentiations. Eva Green's character — the 'Dame to Kill' — her house. She's married to a very wealthy man, so to get the look of that. We could look at some frames of Frank Miller's graphic novel and say, 'OK, this is kind of a guide,' but they are so minimalistic. He really paints in black & white. There is no shading. It's completely silhouettes and that's his style. It's very strong [but] that does not work on film for very long. It becomes very flat and the audience wants the detail of the characters. So it's a cinematic interpretation of that look." What tools was Prime Focus using? "Maya, of course, and Nuke. Those were the major tools. It was rendered with V-Ray, which I hadn't come in contact with. Industrial Light and Magic was always RenderMan and some Mental Ray. They used V-Ray, and I guess it's a fairly inexpensive renderer. It's a ray-tracer. We had a lot of comps, where it was like, 'Wow, this render time is taking very long!' So I'm not a big fan of it. It would have been much easier in RenderMan, but each facility uses different technology." When did you wrap up work? "I wrapped up the first week of July, and the 3D conversion was still going on. We had already gone a little bit longer. For this kind of work, you sort of expect that." The film's B&W style was established even before the DI.

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