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www.postmagazine.com 23 POST JANUARY 2016 O S C A R buzz (Oscar nominated for The Dark Knight) and used such VFX houses as Cinesite, ILM, MPC, Double Negative and Peerless. Top colorist Greg Fisher at Company 3, London, did the DI (he also worked on Everest,) in 4K, lending more weight to the growing perception that the 2K workflow and format are living on bor- rowed time. Directed by Oscar favorite Ron Howard (he won Best Director and Best Picture for A Beautiful Mind), In The Heart of the Sea didn't make much of a splash at the box office, but may be another possible contender. An historical whaling epic that re-teams the director with his Rush star, Chris Hemsworth, it's a retelling of the true sea story that inspired Herman Melville's classic novel "Moby-Dick." Shot by Anthony Dod Mantle, the Oscar winner for Slumdog Millionaire who also shot Rush and Oliver Stone's upcoming spy drama Snowden, the film was cut by Howard's longtime editing team of Dan Hanley and Mike Hill, and features extensive VFX — especially for the killer whale — done by such hous- es as Scanline VFX, Rodeo FX, Double Negative and Luma. Also deserving of Oscar attention is the acclaimed sci fi AI thriller Ex Machina and its VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst (Skyfall). In order to tell the most compelling and emotional story possible, Whitehurst didn't go down the usual performance capture road, instead allowing star Alicia Vikander to act and interact with her cast and crew as she would in a "normal" movie. With no pre-vis, he worked around the block- ing choices of the actors and director and DP, and not the other way around, and approached Vikander's character, Ava, as an original creature rather than looking at other robots for inspiration. The team started by modeling her in the computer, and the first Ava was born from a 3D printer. Because almost every scene involving Ava features long dialogue shots where she would have to interact with the other actors, they knew Vikander would have to work on set unencumbered, so per- formance capture was never an option. They opted for body capture, which was also challenging. Many of the shots were 200 frames long, and one was 1,600 frames, so to track them throughout with precision was daunting. Additionally the anamorphic lens distortion was also a hurdle. Ultimately it took six months of post production to marry Vikander's per- formance with the VFX team's render- ing to create Ava. Whitehurst says that he translated "as much as possible" of Vikander's on-set performance into the CGI model, and his team spent countless hours matching their anmation to her movements. It was a painstaking process, yet an essential one. "There are a lot of very big ideas in this film and those ideas are being explored not just in the narrative, but visually," says Whitehurst. "We were encouraged to embrace those ideas and to really think through what would be the most interesting and beau- tiful ways to solve the various design problems posed by Ava. We were always looking at the images we were produc- ing, and thinking, 'How well does this work? Why does this work? What effect does it have on the audience? Do you believe this is a machine someone could fall in love with?' They're difficult ques- tions to grapple with." Everest, the recent film about a climbing tragedy set against punishing conditions on the world's highest moun- tain, may not have been a huge hit, but it required a huge mount of VFX shots — "around 1,000," according to its Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur. "We used various vendors including Framestore, One of Us, ILP, Stereo D and Milk VFX with my company RVX doing most of the work," he reports. Heading up the VFX was his frequent VFX supervisor Dadi Einarsson (Gravity). "I would say the difference with this show and the other three we've done together was primar- ily that the VFX were such an integral part of the storytelling and believability of the film," says Einarsson, who had to deliver "seamless and photoreal VFX for large portions of the film. The mountain is almost like a character and as such needed to be completely believable, beautiful and perilous. We had originally planned to send a mountain unit to the summit to shoot plates and 2 nd unit with body doubles for all of our locations. This had to be called off when they were in Basecamp due to the avalanche tragedy of last year, so there was even more onus on us to create the environments and backgrounds. Our base plan for the show revolved around creating a photogram- metry model of the whole mountain and surroundings. This would allow us to fly virtual cameras around, to previs and postvis, to supply location-accurate lay- out for all scenes in the film that needed background replacement and eventu- ally to create fully-CG 'helicopter' shots around the summit." For research, the team had a full time photo researcher gathering as much visual material as possible for refer- ence. "We also had a climber who had summited Everest come to RVX to talk about the experience and show us his slideshow," reports Einarsson. He adds that every VFX shot — from snow to ice Mad Max: Fury Road has 2,800 VFX shots, making it a strong contender in that category.