Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/629103
www.postmagazine.com 24 POST JANUARY 2016 O S C A R buzz and cold breath — presented their own challenges. "We tried to be as realistic and non-fantasy as we possibly could with everything. Cold breath in particular needs to be so well done for it not to be distracting and clearly fake." To get it right, the team studied the look and then came up with a fluid animation rig in Maya, "timed breaths to dialogue and exhales, and then animated the wind direction and turbulence to match the practical snow being blown on set." The VFX team also made extensive use of digital doubles, green screen, background replacements and CG aug- mentation. Einarsson says that "Digi dou- bles were used on quite a few shots. The fully-CG shots around the summit, up the Lhotse Face and so on needed digi doubles as did shots where we extended the backgrounds to see far off into the distance. We would often add climbers walking in the distance. Green screen was used in everything for Basecamp and Camp 4 day shots, which were shot in Cinecitta Studios in Rome, as well as the Khumbu Icefalls, Balcony, Hillary Step, Camp 4 night shots, Pumori and Summit, which were shot in Pinewood Studios." Camps 1, 2 and 3 were shot in the Dolomites, and backgrounds were replaced with digital matte paintings or CG environments. RVX was the lead VFX studio and did around half the shots, including all of Basecamp, the Khumbu Icefalls, Camp 1, 2, 3 and 4, as well as the photogram- metry Everest build, previs, postvis and layout. Einarsson also worked closely with Framestore in London; Important Looking Pirates in Stockholm "who have a really nice FX pipeline, so they were a good fit for the white-out sequence"; One of Us, "who were perfect for the Summit and storm hit shots"; and Union. In terms of of sharing assets and sequences, he says the key was the pho- togrammetry model. "RVX shared this with all other studios, which was then the base for creating their environments and backgrounds. Some sequences or aspects of sequences were shared. For instance, RVX did the fully-CG shot for the Summit sequence and helicopter rescue sequence, whereas One Of Us and Union did the sequences respective- ly. RVX also did around 200 cold breath shots on other VFX studios' sequences after they had been finaled. This was down to schedule, capacity and all kinds of logistics." The harrowing war drama Beasts of No Nation, from writer/director Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre, Jayne Eyre, True Detective), is about as far as you can get from Everest, set as it is in the sweltering lands of West Africa and shot in Ghana. And the "brutal" shoot was matched by "a very tough" post, says the director. To tell the story of a young villager who be- comes a boy soldier after his happy fam- ily life and childhood are shattered in a bloody rebellion, Fukunaga used two edi- tors — Danish editor Mikkel EG Nielsen (A Royal Affair) and Pete Beaudreau (All Is Lost, The Gambler) — to deal with "roughly 75 hours of raw footage from Ghana." Editing was done at Outpost Digital in New York, along with all the post. "We were there almost a year, and we started on post while we were shoot- ing in Ghana," he reports. "Victoria Lesiw, our associate editor, started off as an as- sistant editor in Ghana, and was there all the way through and completely invest- ed from production to the very last days of post. We'd lose people along the way, so post wasn't at all easy. People had to bow out because of previous commit- ments. We lost our original sound de- signer just weeks before we started our mix, and we had to completely redo it all in a very short time — just five weeks, which wasn't really enough for the film, but we were able to create something out of nothing." The sound mix was done at Harbor Picture Company, New York by Glenfield Payne; supervising sound editor, Martin Czembor; re-recording mixer, Josh Berger; assistant sound re-re- cording mixer and Ian Gaffney Rosenfeld, re-recording mix technician. It was mixed using a Euphonix S5 Fusion console, controlling two ProTools systems running ProTools 11. VFX contributed to the film's cinema verite look and feel, especially in all the battles scenes. "There was a lot of clean up, and a lot of artifacts of war — bullet hits on walls, blood squibs, which we didn't have time to do as the usual phys- ical effects, muzzle flashes, augmenting explosions and so on," says Fukunaga. "Then we had the big infra-red sequence. I'd written the screenplay back in 2006, and I loved the infra-red sequence Oliver Stone and Prieto had done in Alexander, so I always wanted to do it. I wanted to shoot some infra-red in True Detective, but we just couldn't find the film stock, and we just did it as a VFX sequence for this. Siren Lab did most of them, and The Artery also did some shots." The DI was done at Deluxe in New York, with Steve Bodner, the same colorist Fukunaga used on True Detective. "He's the guy I go to for anything. We did some looks before I left, but more than anything we just get in the room and figure it all out. I love the DI and we did a lot of work, because the whole issue with digital is that you spend so much time trying to get back to a film look. So after shooting it with the Alexa, I was looking how to approximate that slightly under-exposed reversal look, and I found that by shooting one stop under and bringing in a lot of cyans and the blacks, but keeping the saturation up, and then figuring out how to make all the greens, yellows and browns really pop, it gave me the look I wanted." Director/writer David O. Russell has been Oscar-nominated five times since 2011's The Fighter, his last three films have garnered 25 Oscar nominations between them, and his newest film Joy, loosely based on the life of Miracle Mop inventor Joy Mangano, looks likely to continue the trend. The genre-blurring epic, which stars Jennifer Lawrence in the title role, Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper, tells the story of a family across four generations, and took a team of four editors; Chris Tellefsen and Tom Cross began the work, and then Russell's usual team of Jay Cassidy and Alan Baumgarten took over. The latter report that it took "over seven months" to cut. Spectre featured some spectacular VFX work.