Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/398272
www.postmagazine.com 19 POST OCTOBER 2014 it's still too slow." Do you like post? "I love it, and I enjoy it more now as it's so hassle-free. Back in '99 when we did Fight Club, we had a lot of very tricky post stuff to do — pin-registered transfers and so on — and it was a drag. Now, I feel like we're fi nally at a point where the medium is plastic and you can do anything — and I thought we'd reach this stage back in '01! (Laughs) So it's taken all these years to get to where you don't have to talk about the pain of exe- cuting something. If you need to change something in the background or change someone's eyes, it's just not a big problem anymore." The fi lm was edited by Kirk Baxter. Tell us about that relationship and how it worked. Was he on the set? "No, he and Tyler [Nelson, assistant editor] are back in LA cutting, and I prefer that, although Tyler did come out to reclaim footage at some panicked moments and to supervise the ingest technology, which is very close to being a completely robotic process, but which you need to set up. Even on Dragon in Sweden, they were back in LA. So editorial is wholly integrated into production, but it's also its own banana republic, and we have such faith in their ability to execute and make it all seamless. If I can see it at as offl ine, I know it'll work, and they're wholly autonomous as they'll usually come up with a better solution than I would." How important is image stabilization to you? "It's a very big deal to me, in that there's only so much a camera crew can do, when someone's pushing a dolly and you're trying to tilt a camera and so forth. You don't have much control, so I'll work on all that in the edit and post with like-minded people who'll comb through the footage to get each frame right. We did it on House of Cards, which really pioneered it for us, as we stabilized every shot — and it's the same thing in this. Nearly every single image is manipulated to make the camera opera- tion as perfect as possible. I want people to forget that the camera's being moved around by someone." How many visual eff ects shots are there in the fi lm? "Around 2,000, and they were done by Digital Domain and Ollin Studio, but then it depends how you defi ne a VFX shot. We did a lot of retouching of hairlines, wigs, and there's a lot of cosmetic stuff to do with Rosa- mund's character's weight loss and gain, refl ections in sunglasses, and tons of set extensions, lens fl ares, adding leaves to trees and such." You've done music videos for everyone from the Stones to Madonna and Jay-Z. Can you talk about the importance of music and sound to you as a fi lmmaker? Where did you do the mix? "We always mix at Skywalker, and my philosophy is that people don't go to the movies to see something — they go to feel, and so every part — editing, the music and sound design, and even the stabilization — is there to help that. And the music isn't about, how do I keep people awake? Or how do I keep this bit from being boring? It's really about imparting a feeling to people I've never met, and what [composers] Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross do is enable parts of your conscious mind to accept things that are entering on a subconscious level. It's pretty amazing. And it's the same with all the sound design, and the sound of the cicadas." The DI must have been vital. Where did you do it and how did that process help? "We did it at Light Iron, who we used previously on The Social Network and Dragon Tattoo, and it's so import- ant to me and it's getting more and more important in the way you can customize just a part of a shot." Did the fi lm turn out the way you hoped? "They never do, although I'm very happy with it. There are parts I love but also a couple of other bits I wish I could go back and re-work, but I can't. All in all, I'm satisfi ed." What's next? "I'm hoping to do more work for HBO but I don't have another fi lm lined up yet." Is fi lm dead? "No, it'll stick around as a sub-category, and it can be very beautiful, but it's the past, not the future." DIRECTOR'S CHAIR Tyler Nelson worked as assistant editor on Gone Girl to editor Kirk Baxter, who also both worked together with David Fincher on House of Cards, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This is the fi rst major studio production to be edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Can you talk about the pipeline you developed? "Baxter had cut a commercial using Pre- miere a few years ago, and it had a ton of footage, so it was a good template for see- ing if it could handle all our fi lm footage. So we dabbled with ideas and used it in our traditional feature fi lm pipeline, to re- ally test its limits and work with it as much as possible to fi nd where the holes were, and then discuss those with the Adobe engineers. That way, they could improve it and almost customize it for our needs. For the fi rst couple of months of production, Adobe had a group of engineers at our editorial facility to help fi x bugs, create new features for us, and to work closely with us to make the system more profes- sional for future use in features." Fincher is famous for padding his images. How did that work? "We shot 6K 2:1, with pixel values of 6,144 x 3,072, but we were extracting a 2.40:1 center extraction at 5K, which was 5,120 x 2,133. Basically, that allotted us enough padding to move the image up and down, left to right, and we used that in our editorial environment. So when we were working with our dailies, we were actually scaling down these 6K plates to a pixel value of 2,304 x 1,152 for our edit media, and when we brought these into editorial, mathematically, the 5K extraction was scaled down to 1920 x 800, which was the size of our record monitor in Premiere. In previous fi lms, we cropped our edit media to the center extraction, so if we wanted to move the image up and down too far, or left to right, we'd have to go back to the orig- inal source material, whereas with Pre- miere, we were able to use this padded image in our timeline, using this 2,304 x 1,152 image and moving it around, and not compromising losing any area of the image. So when Kirk's working, he can just slide the image left or right, and have all that real estate available, and that ability had been on our wish list for a long time." ASSISTANT EDITOR… TYLER NELSON Gone Girl was shot in 6K and edited entirely in Adobe Premiere.