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www.postmagazine.com 22 POST JANUARY 2016 O S C A R buzz Dolby Atmos mix which is amazing as it gives you all this clarity and separation between dialogue and all the effects and other layers." The DI was done at Company 3 in London. "I love the DI," he adds. "For me, it's the final touch, like grading still photographs, and I used my favorite colorist, Stephen Nakamura, who's a top guy at their LA office and he'd travel to London. He's very fast, and we did the whole film in just two weeks, and I'm very happy with the way it looks." Another VFX tour de force that should merit Oscar attention is Oscar winner Bob Zemeckis' The Walk. Always at the cutting edge of technology — and highly skilled at integrating that technology in the service of telling stories — the director put moviegoers in the shoes of Philippe Petit, the French aerialist who in 1974 stunned New Yorkers — and the world — with his high-wire walk between the iconic Twin Towers of the almost-completed World Trade Center. Zemeckis was aided by DP Dariusz Wolski and visual effects supervisor Kevin Baillie, who co-founded Atomic Fiction and pioneered cloud rendering. For this, Baillie's teams in Oakland and Montreal did about 9.1 billion hours of processing in the cloud, "which is over 1,000 years on a single processor," he notes. Even with the new office in Montreal, with an extra 100 people on the project, they had to bring in other companies to help handle the load — Rodeo FX in Montreal, UPP in Prague and Legend 3D. Ultimately, post and VFX took about eight months. Baillie stresses that the director's effective use of 3D and leisurely long shots — and the film's pacing, which perfectly parallels the material — meant that The Walk had just 826 total shots — "a quarter of the usual number, and out of those, 672 were VFX shots," reports Baillie. "But that equates to over 2,000 VFX shots in a normal film, so there were a lot to deal with." Recreating the New York 1974 skyline completely digitally took four months, even with a dedicated team, and the result is stunning. Oscar-winning writer/director/produc- er George Miller also deserves Oscar at- tention for Mad Max: Fury Road, the $375 million-grossing smash and fourth in the blockbuster series. Shot in the Namibian desert with Alexas (supplemented with Canon EOS 5D Mark IIs and Olympus P5s) by John Seale, the acclaimed Aussie cinematographer, who won the Oscar for The English Patient, it was posted in Miller's Sydney offices and took over a year. The film was edited by his wife, Margaret Sixel, who also cut Happy Feet. "We shot for nine months and she was back in Sydney, getting massive amounts of footage," he reports. "We did the sound mix, the DI and post viz as part of editorial, and did a lot of early sound work in Sydney, but then we ended up on the lot at Warners in LA and did the final Atmos mix there with re-recording mixers Chris Jenkins and Gregg Rudloff." Fury has 2,800 VFX shots, and over 2,000 have some VFX elements, notes Miller who collaborated with VFX super- visor Andrew Jackson (300). "A lot of that was done as post viz — so the team did simple comps or simple animation, erasures and so on, and if they were good enough, we didn't pass them on to the VFX houses, Method or Iloura in Sydney." Miller also brought Eric Whipp, a DI colorist from Toronto, who did the Happy Feet films, down to work on it full-time. "Yeah, and in the DI he was really pushing the Baselights to do stuff like sky replacements. The problem was, we shot for nearly 140 days but the story happens over three days, so you needed consistency in the skies, and he was able to do all that very quickly and cheaply in the DI. And we did a preliminary DI on the set and were grading our dailies, and we also had our own Baselights in the editing suites in Sydney. All that was so important — having post viz, edito- rial and Baselight all working together. And often Margaret or her assistants would comp performances in editorial, so there's a lot of plasticity between the cuts now that we didn't have in the past when it was all celluloid." Other mega-successful franchises that might merit Academy consider- ation include Avengers: Age of Ultron, Furious 7, Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, Spectre, and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2. Over the last few years, director Francis Lawrence has helped steer the Hunger Games series of films — and directed three of the four — to becoming one of the most successful franchises of all time (over $2 billion and counting, so far). And for the final install- ment of the sci-fi dystopian series he in- tegrated post into the shoot, "Right from the start — and we're thinking about post all the way through. So the editors were on very early, and Charlie Gibson, the VFX supervisor (his credits include all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies), and even some of the VFX houses like D Neg, were on from the start. So during prep they're all involved in the planning in terms of the scheduling, the location choices and so on." Post was done at Tribeca West, where he did the last three movies, and the film was edited by Alan Edward Bell and Mark Yoshikawa. There were some 1,100 VFX shots, done by ven- dors from all over the world, including Double Negative in London, Weta in New Zealand, MPC in London and Vancouver, The Embassy, Lola and Cantina. The score was recorded at Abbey Road, and the mix was done on the lot at Warners with mixer Skip Lievsay and sound designer Jeremy Peirson, the team Lawrence has worked with since his first film. The DI was done at Efilm. Avengers: Age of Ultron, which was also edited by two editors — Jeffrey Ford and Lisa Lassek, similarly needed many VFX vendors, including Double Negative, Method Studios, ILM and Animal Logic, while Spectre was cut by Lee Smith The Revenant was shot completely outdoors and relied solely on natural light. The Martian could reward director Ridley Scott for both its story and visual effects.