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director's chair expected, since it's so new to me. I had to learn it all, and it's just amazing what you can do. Audiences probably won't notice, but in the last 40 min- utes of the movie, there isn't one shot of Kristen that isn't a visual effects shot. We made her thinner and gaunter, and it was done so subtly that it's totally realistic. It doesn't even look like visual effects work. So if your next film is a drama that spans 30 years and someone gets sick, it's so exciting to have those tools at your disposal now." POST: What was the most difficult effects shot to do? CONDON: "The baby. You have a normal screaming baby, and we knew we'd replace the face digitally, but it's all about photorealism and really believ- ing that, yes, it's a baby but also this quasi-magical figure and a very delicate moment. Edson Williams at Lola really nailed that for us." POST: Tell us about audio and the mix. How important is it in your films? CONDON: "I've always felt it's a huge part, and of course Kristen Stewart's character was made thinner and more gaunt via VFX for the last part of Breaking Dawn. kenstein flashbacks — the smallest detail, but he worked to get the texture just right." POST: How many visual effects shots were there, and who did them? CONDON: "Between the two films we have many hundred more than Avatar — it's crazy! But we shot everything on a sound- stage. The whole house was built, so there's a huge amount of greenscreen work. Almost every shot has greenscreen. We easily had a dozen houses doing effects, including Tippett Studio, who did the wolf animation, Lola/VFX, Pixel Magic, Spin, Hydraulx VFX, Engine Room, Mr. X Inc., Soho and Method CIS in Canada. I know a lot of directors complain about all the waiting for effects shots to come in but I didn't feel that so much because we were on such a schedule and there were so many. By the end, it was like, stop already! There were arriving by the truckload." POST: Did you enjoy working with visual effects? CONDON: "I did — far more than I 16 Post • December 2011 I've done musicals where it's front and center. Here, the mix of horror and melodrama is so dependent on the heightening that music and sound brings. I love mixing and we did the all mixing with Mike Minkler at Todd-AO (with Tony Lamberti on Euphonix System 5), who won Oscars for Dreamgirls and Chicago, and then sound editor Dane Davis was so cre- ative. There was so much unusual detail, like the talking wolves, and getting inside the head of these magical creatures, and he even went out and spent a week with real wolves, gath- ering sounds and so on. For the scene where all the venom is coursing through Bella's body, he layered in bits of Kristen's dialogue from the film, along with breaths, so you really had the sense of being inside her head. And the score by Carter Burwell, which we recorded at Abbey Road in London, and all the songs, almost act as parts of the story, carrying you through the big moments." POST: Did you do a DI? CONDON: "Yes, at EFilm. I've done a few on commercials but this was only my second www.postmagazine.com film DI. The first time, it's so new and exciting that you tend to go crazy. This time, the DP Guillermo Navarro, who shoots most of Guill- ermo Del Toro's films, worked very closely with colorist Yvan Lucas as we shot. He has someone take a photo of every scene and color times and sends it to the lab, so there were the least number of adjustments made between the Avid cut and the final cut, as the color had been so meticulously supervised by him in the dailies." POST: How did you get such a great look for the vampires — was that in the DI? CONDON: "A lot, yes. Right from the start we began to experiment and do tests, as often in other movies it feels like you can see all the makeup. In the book they're described as pale, but also having this marble-like quality. So in prep with Yvan we experimented with the idea of de-graining just their faces. It looked great, and that's ultimately what we did, even before the final DI. There's a circle around every vampire's face, slight de-graining, and you get this smoothness that you can't quite identify. It allowed us in production to dispense with all the usual pancake makeup. So though it was a post decision, it began in prep." POST: The digital world rules in post. Is film dead? CONDON: "No, I don't think so. We shot this 35mm, and then in post Yvan did this output comparison showing maybe five sec- onds each from 30 scenes across three min- utes, with film on one side and digital on the other, and I was shocked at the difference as I'm a big digital fan — the film had more depth and richness." POST: Any interest in doing a 3D film? CONDON: "Not much. I actually explored the idea of shooting the final installment of this in 3D, as Bella wakes up as a vampire, and I thought that would be an interesting way to go. But it was unwieldy as we were shooting both simultaneously, and going from a tradi- tional camera package to a 3D one in the same day was just too much." POST: Will you shoot your next film digitally? CONDON: "I'm not sure. I've been trying to make this movie about Richard Pryor, and a lot's in the form of a concert, and a lot's stand up, so that's a situation where being able to just let a camera run for 40 minutes would be great. So shooting digital has those kinds of advantages. I'd love to do another musical, but I don't have anything specific yet. I guess musi- cals are a dead genre, yet it always figures out a way to reinvent itself."