Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/6359
www.postmagazine.com January 2010 • Post 43 generally in the most fanci- ful environment of the film, which is this place called The Tree of Souls. It's lit green from below, purple from above, by bioluminescence, and noth- ing looked right. It took a lot of experimentation to get it to look visually plausible." POST: Tell us about audio and the mix. CAMERON: "It's so key to any movie, and we spent a lot of time on the mix, which we did on the Fox lot, on the Howard Hawkes stage. I had three great mixers — Chris Boyes was the sound designer and chief mixer, and Gary Summers and Andy Nelson also did the sound mix. We got fried from the sheer wall of sound. "Reel 7 was so loud in the missile attack scene we had to stop mixing and come back a day later when our ears had rested enough. And that was only two- thirds of the way through the movie. We were dread- ing having to mix the final battle. We'd been building up all the sounds for literally a year, but it all went quite smoothly since it wasn't a sustained barrage of sound like Reel 7." POST: This has to be the most technically difficult film you've ever made and mixed. CAMERON: "Totally.The sound was as tough on Terminator 2, True Lies and Titanic, and not to mini- mize that, but I always go crazy on the sound. We went as crazy on the picture as we normally do with the sound, and it really was almost like a picture mix. We actually took over the Rober t Wise stage in Building 29 and turned it into the image mix. We brought in a da Vinci Resolve, and did all our color and stereo space adjustments there. We had two Avids and our Polycom to Weta in Wellington [New Zealand]. We did all of our visual effects reviews in there, for eight hours a day, and our stereoscopic re- views too, so it was our image central. We had a team of 10 sitting at workstations all day long." POST: I guess you do a digital intermediate, except it's not really a digital intermediate? CAMERON: "Yes, calling it 'the DI' is a little inaccu- rate as you're never in film, but the idea of a DI where you do all the final color correction and power win- dowing is the same. So we still call it the DI [laughs]. We did it adjacent to doing all the VFX reviews, so we'd feed a shot in from one of the VFX vendors, and sometimes we wouldn't even get it done with the vendor. We'd ask them to send us an alpha on the foreground and we'd just stick it into the Re- solve and then we'd work in the Resolve and actu- ally finish the composite there — maybe lighten up the background. I found it to be almost a fantasy of what I'd always imagined this'd be, when it all con- verged properly." POST: There seems to be a big hybrid trend now, with films mixing visual effects, animation and live action. CAMERON: "There is, but I also feel the audi- ence doesn't care how it's done as long as it feels like a cohesive whole to them, and when we de- cided to go to Pandora and spend four years there, we just felt, we'll do it with whatever it takes to make it real. If we can shoot it, we'll shoot it. If we have to use CG, we'll do CG. And if we need a hy- brid of the two, we'll do that too." POST: Did the film turn out the way you hoped? CAMERON: "Yes and no. When you're cutting, you wake up one day and realize, I don't need that scene. So a scene I might have felt — for two years — was really critical to the film, is suddenly out. So you can't say, I always saw it exactly how it was going to be, but that's par t of the fun and the journey. The stor y takes on its own life, and you wrestle it like a boa constrictor, and eventually you have to wrestle it into submission — or die!" [ cont. from 16 ] D I R E C T O R ' S C H A I R sound effects, ADR… and it was a logical thing to get me to do the music, so I became par t of the team." Posner created approximately 35 cues for the film, averaging about :60 to :90 each, with the longest running over four minutes and being fea- tured in the film's fight scene finale. "A lot of what you write comes from the palette," says Posner. "What is the band going to be? In Holly- wood movies, you know the band is going to be a 90- piece orchestra, but that cer tainly wasn't the case here. And it wasn't appropriate either. Seeing the set- ting of the movie and knowing it was a comedy, it be- came clear to me that there would be a few instru- ments that were fitting to suit the rustic-ness of it and provide a little bit of humor." One of those instruments was a banjo. The other was an accordion."I quickly latched onto this sound of an organic, small-sounding ensemble with a double bass and drums, and a 'jazzy bent' to it." Posner was fortunate to get a video edit that pretty much stayed locked. "It was a work print," he recalls, "but I did have timings to work to that stayed put." He spent approximately two months writing and recording the score, and called the timeframe "luxuri- ous" compared to more common cases. "I was programming drums and strings, and any or- chestra sounds. And I had my friend Ian Lefeuvre play the banjo and guitar. There is a lot of clarinet on the score and I faked that for the demos, but when it came time to record stuff, I had a couple of sessions with a real bass player, drummer and clarinet player. There were a couple of tracks that needed dobro and slide guitar. I have a friend in a smaller town in Ontario and we did that remotely. I sent him files and gave him a guide track, and he sent files back to me to fit into the session." [ cont. from 39 ] A U D I O scene. Here blue, low-polygon rigged CG characters duplicate the movements from the previous version. Their heads also have low-reso- lution renditions of the facial motion capture. The semi transparent look of the features gets them dubbed the "Kabuki mask" versions. When Cameron was shooting the scenes, it could take an hour to get two or three shots and get them exactly the way he wanted — to really refine them and do the smoothing and adjust the lighting. Now you come up to the forth step in the process. "You fi- nally got your dailies," the director says smiling. Even with the very basic process of moviemaking changed in this revolutionar y, paradigm-shifting way Rivkin still feels that "the same things that apply in any feature film situation apply here. We're trying to find the best way to tell the story. We're dealing with per- formance and basic stor ytelling. Tr ying to make the best movie possible using the same editing tech- niques and intuition and instinct that come into play in any film." It's a whole new world. [ cont. from 20 ] A V A T A R made of Jello — "it offer s a Sex and the City vibe," he says. "This spot was a wonderful example of the new frontier. It was a mar velous concept and we knew we could make the gelatin appear like a real environment. So you these see gorgeous, slender woman thriving be- cause they were smar t enough to eat Jello instead of terrible, caloric desser ts. It was a really fun spot that was creative and beautiful. It was a smar t way to rebrand Jello as something fresh and hip." Smar t being the keyword. Because of the smaller budgets, the content has needed to become much more clever. "We all real- ized that rather than being afraid of new budgets we had to be smarter about what they were — and they are spurring creativity." Another thing that helps foster creativity is clients coming to BUF earlier in the process. "We are having much more of an exploratory conversation early on. The earlier we start, the smarter we can be with our budgets and come up with solutions by working to- gether and solving these problems," says Adams. BUF is also starting to see clients ask for solutions other than just visual effects, and they look at this as an oppor tunity to grow. "Sometimes we are being asked to do things from star t to finish, which I love," he says. In situations like these, BUF will use their rela- tionships with outside directors and production com- panies, as well as call on home-grown talent. While most of BUF's business is currently for broadcast, Adams does see the Web becoming "in- creasingly more impor tant on a daily basis. Some- times there is a Web component to the approach and we automatically know the piece is going to ap- pear on the Internet. So we do a 30-second spot, a 15-second cut down, and elements for the Web ver- sion that is oftentimes included in the bid. It's no longer an afterthought," he says. BUF is one of those rare commercial houses that builds its own tools. "We are known for our in-house software," says Adams. "We have a very strong R&D department that is constantly pushing to find new ways to create things; it keeps us in the forefront — creative and moving forward." V F X F O R S P O T S [ cont. from 30 ]