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GHOSTBUSTERS www.postmagazine.com 22 POST AUGUST 2016 own personal needs and then share with the other vendor to create a complete Times Square. "In talking about this ghost fight, that was shot on a stage and so we ended up replacing everything, even the ground they were standing on, to make it look like aged asphalt and then the entire background was all replaced. Pretty much everything was CG, except for the actual ghost- busters themselves, and then some of the ghosts that come out are actors that were augmented to look like ghosts. Heavily augmented. Augmented so many times you should just say replaced (laughs)." What was the biggest challenge of doing the VFX for this film? Travers: "There are challenges every- where. You always look at a film in the beginning and you have your educated guesses where the challenges would be. Inevitably, in every movie, there's always an area that's surprising how hard it is and also there are areas you know that as long as you prep them, they're going to work. "My personal favorite in the movie is the parade balloon sequence. Because getting back to what we were talking about earlier, we needed to find a way to light the environment — that gets a little challenging when these glowing parade balloons are three stories high and floating through the streets of NY. The parade balloons were actually shot with balloons that we floated in the scene that were lit from the interior. Otherwise, it would have been very difficult to light the environment. It was actually shot in downtown Boston in the middle of the night and we're running around with these giant glowing balloons and driving them around on these carts. It was a wild experience, but what was most import- ant about it was that everybody on-set was able to see where it was going. If we're trying to do some elaborate effect on-set and everybody's coming to me to ask, 'How does this work?' 'What's going on?' and they're all confused, odds are, you're going to lose and it's never going to look right. There were still questions to be answered, but when we had physi- cal balloons that were paraded through the street, we had the palette to work with. You're always trying to guess what reflections would do, what lighting would do, but with this, it gave us a starting point. The balloons we had on-set versus the balloons we eventually built digitally are very different from each other. But what's really neat about the parade is that Dan's team really ran with it as far as the simulations of the balloons and the effects that went on." Kramer: "I think one of the fun parts about it was, that we made these creepy looking balloons that were inspired by these old-time Macy's Day Parades. We found lots of reference footage — black and white photography from the 1930s. A lot of it is black and white, so you can't tell color, but if you look up the actual balloons themselves, they're super creepy. So we didn't change them that much." Ghostbusters was shot on-location through- out Massachusetts on Arri Alexa XT cameras, edited on Avid and was completed with nearly 1,700 VFX.