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Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, Gives The Irishman His All Jan 10, 2020

For its critical success, awards buzz, and technical breakthroughs revolving around the unique use of brand-new digital de-aging techniques on lead actors for extended sequences, it might be easy to forget Martin Scorsese’s new Netflix financed-and-streamed gangster epic The Irishman is largely a classically shot film. At least that’s the point of view of the film’s cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, ASC, AMC, who, at press time, was nominated for an ASC award and in consideration for his third Oscar nomination for his effort on the project.

During his recent conversation with StudioDaily for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series, Prieto emphasized that the movie is first and foremost a study of the lead character, Frank Sheeran, a mob hitman played by Robert De Niro, and that it is themed around “memory, time, and the point of view of this particular person.”

“We tried hard to find a way to make the movie subjective about Frank Sheeran, and also make the audience have that feeling of the passage of time and of our own memories and lives,” Prieto explains. “That is what we all look for as an audience when we are seeing a movie or any piece of art, for that matter: we are trying to see ourselves, and find out how our soul is in any way connected to that piece of art. So the first challenge was to portray time, and [the second challenge] was the de-aging and visual effects part of it.”

The need to emphasize the personal nature of the story required, in Prieto’s view, a classic shooting style, which is why he emphasizes his frequent use of a static or near-static camera for most scenes involving Sheeran. After all, the film is based on Sheeran’s memoir, I Heard You Paint Houses, which may or may not tell a true story about the fate of legendary union leader Jimmy Hoffa. Thus, this is intimately Sheeran’s story. In it, he is the link between the Mafia and Hoffa (played by Al Pacino), and eventually, the person charged with deciding Hoffa’s fate.

In his conversation with Studio, Prieto, however, doesn’t ignore the second challenge, which included an intimately close collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic to design a so-called “three-headed monster” camera rig. That methodology permitted Prieto to simultaneously capture performance imagery and data that allowed ILM to build state-of-the-art infrared maps of the faces of De Niro, Pacino, and co-star Joe Pesci. ILM’s techniques allowed them to appear both younger and older for different time periods during the piece. For that work, the cinematographer helped design the camera rig holding a Red Helium 8K digital camera and two Alexa Minis that was used to film the de-aging sequences. That approach was required for approximately 50 percent of the film. For the rest of the movie, Prieto shot on 35mm film negative using Cooke Panchro Classic lenses for both digital and film cameras.

But that just scratches the surface. The project also required him to design both Kodachrome (for the 1950s) and Ektachrome (for the 1960s) look-up tables (LUTs) for those key time periods, as well as an ENR style LUT for the end of the movie. Those efforts were aided by both colorist Matt Tomlinson at the Harbor Picture Company, where the film’s complicated digital intermediate effort was wrangled, and Philippe Panzini, software research and design chief at Codex in London.

All these challenges, and more, combined together made the experience essentially “a final exam for me, about everything that I learned in my career — how to apply everything, all my experience,” according to Prieto.

To hear his first-person account of the effort, watch the video above or download the audio version.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

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VFX Supervisor Bill Westenhofer on Gemini Man and Making a Digital Movie Star Oct 18, 2019

In 2012, veteran VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer shared an Academy Award for spearheading the stunning VFX work that led to the creation of a believable living, breathing tiger in director Ang Lee’s award-winning film, Life of Pi. Fast forward several years, with the state of the art hurtling past previous roadblocks, and Westenhofer found himself receiving a call from Lee to help him out on his newest project — Gemini Man, based on a story concept that had been percolating around Hollywood for many years, finally starring Will Smith.

The problem with Gemini Man was that the story is about a man who is hunted down and attacked by his own, identical, but younger, clone. For many years, various filmmakers didn’t think the use of two separate actors would make the organic nature of the clone believable, especially since the character is essentially the film’s co-star, requires extensive screen time, and is featured in numerous lengthy sequences and in close-up.

According to Westenhofer during his recent conversation with Studio for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series, Lee asked him to “do for a digital human what you did for the tiger in Life of Pi.” In other words, Lee believed a fully realistic and believable digital human with extensive screen time was possible and could be pulled off without instigating the typical “uncanny valley” critiques and comparisons that have dogged previous attempts at digital humans on the big screen. In taking up the challenge to create a 100 percent digital, 20-something Will Smith to play opposite his real-world, 50-something twin, Westenhofer teamed with Weta Digital, whose work he greatly admired from the recent Planet of the Apes movies, and they set to work figuring it out.

Oh, and Ang Lee also was, and remains, intensely passionate about the notion of making movies at ultra high frame rates and resolution — 120fps/4K in the case of Gemini Man, which was also shot native 3D.

“What’s fun with Ang Lee is that he is courageous and adventurous, and it’s always an interesting ride — he likes to try to do something that hasn’t been done before,” says Westenhofer. “So, with this one, there were two fronts. There was the digital human, and we obviously have Will Smith together in the frame with himself. And that’s the rub — it’s his clone. We wanted it to be him, not just an actor looking like him. We wanted it to be a young Will Smith. That was the goal. And because they were both in the frame at the same time, it kind of discounted the traditional de-aging method of filming him in makeup and doing a post process on top to smooth out wrinkles and make him look younger. We needed to go digital.

“But also, since Ang’s previous effort with [Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk in 2016], he is interested in high frame rate. The idea is by shooting at 120 frames a second, it starts to eliminate excessive motion blur and flicker, and it looks more like human vision to, in his mind, increase the immersion that enhances that effect.

“So back to the digital human, with high frame rate and 4K, details like concealing makeup on an actor become evident. So we had to go with a digital human with youthful skin, upping the fidelity with Weta to show a young Will Smith as he was meant to be.”

The resulting project included sharing and borrowing some R&D techniques with the ongoing Avatar projects at Weta; inventing entirely new tools, including one called “Deep Shapes,” which was designed to bring stunning realism to facial expressions; and doing reams of research on how human skin and muscles act and react, among other things. Along the way, they also came up with a new filming methodology to collect motion and acting elements from Smith, who was playing both characters separately in two separate shooting processes, and a whole bunch of other digital wizardry.

To hear Westenhofer’s full conversation with Studio and and learn why he thinks the project has important implications across the industry, watch the video above or download the audio version.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

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Production Designer Barbara Ling on How Quentin Tarantino’s Team Brought 1969 L.A. Back to Life Aug 14, 2019

One of the conceits of Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, is the director’s skill at dropping unique fictional characters and a strange fictional story straight out of the director’s oeuvre neatly into a particularly loving photograph of reality in the form of Los Angeles, circa 1969. To accomplish this, Tarantino had to rely on production design as never before, and to be his partner in that endeavor, he drafted veteran designer Barbara Ling, and paired her with supervising location manager Richard Schuler, set decorator Nancy Haigh, and supervising art director Richard Johnson. He had them practically build — or rather, re-build — iconic locations, restaurants, signage, facades, theaters, stores, and streets of L.A. from that era. Ling and her colleagues, in turn, produced a stunningly believable and memorable backdrop for Tarantino to tell his story about two Hollywood misfits — TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), who isn’t quite transitioning successfully to feature films; and his stunt double and best friend, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), whose career is even more on the rocks. Their adventures and interactions with both real and fictional characters, in turn, lead them to play a key role in confronting one of 1969’s biggest menaces — the Manson Family — in a way no one but Tarantino could possibly have dreamed up.

During her recent podcast conversation with Studio for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series, Ling painted in detail the picture of how she and her colleagues brought iconic L.A. spots to life, including Hollywood Boulevard, Westwood Village, the Playboy Mansion, the Pussycat Theater, restaurants Musso & Frank, Casa Vega, El Coyote and more, not to mention Manson-linked sites like the infamous Spahn Ranch and the Tate murder site on El Cielo Drive.

A lot of it involved “facading,” she explains — formulating a plan “with military precision” to rebuild marquees, facades, and other pieces of architecture, signage, and props from the era and strategically move them in and out of the places they had to go on a rigidly tight schedule, shutting down and then vacating places such as large swaths of Hollywood Boulevard like, literally, clockwork.

“Quentin very much wanted this to be a real world, so that meant no CGI and really putting [sections of the city] back the way they were,” she explains. “The amount of buildings that have been torn down and high-rises and glass buildings put up in Los Angeles is unbelievable. They have taken most of the older architecture down. It’s hard to do L.A. — it’s getting harder every year. We are not a big preservation city. We are a city of reinvention.”

Fortunately, Ling adds, particular sections of Hollywood Boulevard, “being one of the center points for Quentin, had huge sections of architecture still there. We had to rebuild facades, but at least it wasn’t a series of glass towers. But most [theater] marquees today are LED. There are almost none left that are backlit with the plastic letters that you change out. So we had to put back the original marquees, and that was a big feat. We put original facades back on and redressed buildings to what was there in 1969, be it a TV store, a record store, or a poster shop. Hollywood Boulevard was extensive work, which we did in two sections. The city wouldn’t allow us to take all the area we wanted and close it all at the same time, so we did it two blocks [on one side] and two blocks [on the other side], two months apart.”

And that’s just a small taste of the overall scale and degree of difficulty of the job. To hear Ling’s full conversation with Studio and what else the project entailed, watch the video above or download the audio version.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

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Engine Room Founder Dan Schmit on QuickFX and VFX Services in the Cloud Jul 09, 2019

Los Angeles VFX studio Engine Room has launched QuickFX.com, a cloud-based service platform for visual effects project management. According to Engine Room owner Dan Schmit, QuickFX has the potential to bring down the cost of VFX work and, in turn, make local L.A. talent more competitive on the global stage.

QuickFX is a web-based front end giving customers direct access to a platform for managing visual effects projects — everything from a single shot to dozens or hundreds of shots in a job. Running on Amazon Web Services, the platform is designed to make it as easy for Engine Room to evaluate and bid on projects as it is for potential customers to submit them. Users are asked to submit scripts and storyboards or actual files (such as live-action plates) for evaluation, depending on how far along the production is in its process. Generally, a free quote is returned to the user within a few hours’ time.

If Engine Room has sufficient capacity to take on a given job when it is greenlit, or if a job requires a particularly high level of creative input, the work may be handled in house. In other cases, Engine Room will send shots out to outside artists who are matched with given projects according to their skills and experience. Those projects might include green and blue-screen compositing, screen replacements, 3D CG work, fire and explosions, crowd work, cosmetics, set extensions, and more. The idea, Schmit says, is to streamline and organize the whole process to lower costs and increase artists’ competitive leverage in the international VFX market.

If the quote is accepted, users can pay for jobs with credit cards or purchase orders using their QuickFX accounts. Shot review and final delivery all take place through the QuickFX platform, which can be managed from any desktop web browser or with various mobile devices.

Tech Talk podcast: Continue reading the interview below, or click here to listen to our full conversation with Dan Schmit about QuickFX, VFX services in the cloud, and the fraught history of the VFX business in Hollywood.

Schmit, who founded Engine Room in 2001, believes cloud-based platforms like QuickFX are the logical future of the rapidly evolving visual effects industry. “That was a track we got on about six years ago,” Schmit told StudioDaily. “Watching e-commerce and thinking about how the Internet was changing the visual effects business, we started to conceive an online, on-demand visual effects service. The goal was to systematize the visual-effects workflow. We did code development for a good three years, all financed by Engine Room, and then we beta-tested the system for about a year on ourselves.” At this point, Schmit says, the software platform is complete — he says “dozens of projects” have been completed through the QuickFX platform, with some clients returning as repeat users — and the company is turning its focus to sales and marketing.

The QuickFX interface is the same for customers, administrators, and VFX artists, Schmit notes, which is one of the built-in efficiencies in the project. Customers are notified by email or text message when shots are ready for review using built-in tools for commenting and annotation. “Visual effects is a process of revision but, generally speaking, our goal with QuickFX is to have version one be final, if not just one version away from the final,” Schmit says. “We’re commenting on the shots internally, as well. And if a client has a note, it goes straight to the artist. Traditionally, that doesn’t really happen — usually the client has a note, and then the visual effects supervisors get the note and think about it and talk about it, and then we get it to the artists.”

Those artists can be drawn from a pool of talent Engine Room has been curating over the last decade, thanks to another initiative, Radar Hollywood. the company’s online recruitment site. Rather than building a facility that would accommodate large numbers of artists working together, Engine Room was developed as a lean studio with the ability to utilize a large team of off-site artists as necessary. Through Radar Hollywood, the company built a roster that allows it to reach out to available artists as jobs matching their skillsets come in through QuickFX.

“QuickFX really speaks to a future where there’s not a visual effects facility behind a visual effects company,” Schmit says. “It’s more of a place where projects are organized, QC’d and delivered. We’ve been demoing QuickFX at a number of trade shows and it’s been fun seeing the response from the actual visual effects community. I wasn’t really sure how it would be received, because there is a retail visual effects component to what we’re doing. But it’s been really well received.”

Finally, Schmit is keen to point out that Engine Room is not following much of the industry’s lead in sending jobs to Canada, or to hotbeds of VFX labor in Europe or Asia. “Living in Los Angeles, we’ve watched so much production leave the city over the years,” Schmit says. “Part of what we decided to do with QuickFX is to define ourselves as being L.A.-based. The work is going to be done here in L.A. by L.A.-based artists. My hope is that, through more of a level playing field, we can lower the costs here. We can let our artists here in L.A. have a way to compete in a global market.”

Engine Room: engineroomhollywood.com
QuickFX: quickfx.com

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Executive Producer/Director Douglas Mackinnon Explains How Best-Selling Novel Good Omens Finally Made it to Screens as an Amazon Limited Series Jun 17, 2019

According to Douglas Mackinnon, executive producer and director of the new Amazon limited series, Good Omens, the recent success in adapting the best-selling book penned in the late 1980’s by Neil Gaiman (now screenwriter of the series) and Terry Pratchett, was long overdue. He points out that “a survey done by the BBC a few years ago of the 100 most loved books in the English language included Good Omens, but as Neil Gaiman noted to me, it was the only book on the list that had not, at that time, made it into television or film.”

Not for lack of trying, however. In a recent conversation with Studio for the Podcasts from the Front Line series, Mackinnon says various people, including director Terry Gilliam, had been trying to make Good Omens work as a feature film for literally decades. However, “Terry Gilliam told me at our premiere that it was a relief for him to see it on the screen at last. He said he had tried to make it into a two-hour movie, but could never get it off the ground. He said that was because he was trying to abridge it. But it’s not a book that can be abridged. It can’t be shortened. So the six-hour version we’ve made gets in all the story that’s there and all the complicated little avenues that Neil and Terry Pratchett wrote all those years ago.”

What changed, Mackinnon suggests, was filmmakers could finally adapt the book into a broadcast format packaged as a streaming limited series but really, in his view, “a six-hour movie,” because of “the scale that Amazon money gave us, and the technology catching up with CG. So somebody like me doing top-end television can actually tackle a story and subject like this.”

The series, mostly a faithful adaptation of the book, tells the comedic story of an unlikely supernatural duo — an angel (Michael Sheen) and a demon (David Tennant) who team up to oppose their respective “home offices” in heaven and hell in bringing about Armageddon. However, the whole thing goes awry from the get-go when Tennant’s character, the distracted, not-really-so-bad demon Crowley, accidentally misplaces the Antichrist in a small town in England.

The show was shot using Arri Alexa SXT and Mini cameras in the 2.35 aspect ratio, using a range of Leica lenses “because we wanted sharpness and consistency and also needed cameras that could survive in the depth of winter in the UK — and also the depth of the summer in a sandstorm in South Africa, where we also filmed,” Mackinnon explains. “Also, the Alexa [was a good choice] because we had nearly 1,200 CGI shots. It gave us very good green-screen keys for VFX, and it’s got really flexible color rendering, which helped us in the grade at [UK-based facility Molinare with colorist Gareth Spensley].”

To hear Mackinnon’s complete discussion of his adventure shooting Good Omens, watch the video above or download the audio version.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

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Podcast: Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini on (Finally) Shooting Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote May 03, 2019

Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini chuckles in looking back at his 20-plus years collaborating with director Terry Gilliam, originally for 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and then, in 2000, for what was to have been their second team-up for Gilliam’s classic-literature based fantasy story, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He chuckles, of course, because their attempt to film the movie in 2000 collapsed due to a series of disasters, as chronicled in a 2002 documentary [Lost in La Mancha], and Gilliam then spent the next 19 years trying to put the project back together. And through it all, Pecorini was one of his few team members who stuck with him and agreed to give it another go — if Gilliam could ever resuscitate the project. The director did just that and, in 2017, Pecorini headed up the camera team that finally captured the entire story during a shoot in Spain so that it could, at last, be transformed into a feature film, now airing at select theaters around the country and streaming on Amazon.

“My official credit on the film is Nicola ‘Sancho’ Pecorini [after Don Quixote’s faithful squire, Sancho Panza, from Cervantes’ original novel],” Pecorini recently told Studio during a conversation for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series. “That was the way I felt. Terry was crazed for this adventure and wanted someone to go along with him. I felt it was somehow my duty as a friend to catch him if he was falling off the horse, and that happened regularly, actually!”

Pecorini points out that the lengthy era during which Gilliam tried to get the film rejuvenated coincided with the film industry “going full into the digital age that, back then [in 2000], was not even conceivable.” As a result, industry realities — combined with changes in the story as well as budget and timeline considerations — resulted in the movie being shot digitally, on the Arri Alexa platform, along with GoPro footage.

“Because we had to shoot digital, I kind of dug my heels with Terry,” the cinematographer recalls. “We had a few discussions about shooting anamorphic, and Terry was against it at the beginning, and maybe at the end too. But I told him, ‘Let’s keep something cinematic in a classic way [they originally planned to shoot on film in 2000], and shoot it with anamorphic lenses’ that Terry had never used before. We used Technovision [anamorphic primes] that were the same ones made in 1978 for Apocalypse Now. He was wary of it, so I kind of forced them on him, and I’m glad I did.”

Pecorini says the new shoot had its own adventures and challenges, but benefitted from his being a far more experienced cinematographer than he was during the initial attempt in 2000. During his conversation with Studio contributor Michael Goldman, Pecorini eagerly discussed the project’s genesis and the role he played in helping Gilliam make his Don Quixote dream come true at long last. For the entire conversation, listen to the podcast file or watch the video, above.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

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Podcast: Co-Visual Effects Supervisors Richard Hollander and Eric Saindon on the VFX Complexity of Alita: Battle Angel Feb 28, 2019

VFX industry veterans Eric Hollander and Eric Saindon had been involved with the intriguing notion of producing visual effects for Alita: Battle Angel for literally decades when the opportunity finally arrived. The film’s developmental life cycle had brought it in and out of their lives numerous times since they both first read the original script, based on a manga (Japanese comic) series, when James Cameron was planning to direct it back in 2005. Then, three years ago, with Robert Rodriguez at the helm and Cameron producing, the production finally launched, posing some of the most complex CG challenges either had ever faced. After all, they were being asked to head up an effort to produce from the ground up a believable, emotive, all-CG character who would be the lead in a 3D studio film, interacting with real-world actors and environments.

“When Robert [Rodriguez] and [Hollander] came to New Zealand [to Weta Digital] for the first time, we sat in a conference room, and Robert pulled out his computer,” Saindon recently explained during a conversation he and Hollander had for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series. “He said the goal for this movie was to create the first live-action manga character brought to the screen in a realistic way. That was the driving point for the whole film: how do you bring a humanoid CG character to life with live-action characters and still feel the heart and soul of the original manga?”

Hollander represented the production team at Lightstorm and supervised all facilities (Weta Digital, Dneg, and Framestore) while Saindon headed up Weta’s efforts to create a believable CG Alita (played and voiced by Rosa Salazar). The massive project moved forward as an intercontinental collaboration between Rodriguez’ production team at his headquarters in Austin, Texas, Weta’s headquarters in New Zealand, and Los Angeles.

“In [post], Eric was in New Zealand, but he and I worked together on set in Austin three years ago supervising getting the performance capture of [Salazar] and other actors,” Hollander says. “It was exciting to have the problem [of how to make Alita realistic]. I have been involved in building characters from scratch before, but never one that would be this close to being human who was the protagonist for the entire film.”

Indeed, for years, a massive R&D project produced new tools and approaches to allow performance data capture at higher fidelity than in the past.

“The big breakthrough was the amount of detail we were able to capture in performance capture,” Saindon says. “We are using more cameras at higher resolution, which gives us better information to track and capture [actors’] performances. We used two HD cameras to capture [Salazar’s] facial information — the first time we had ever done two cameras on the face. It allowed us to capture more depth information — how big her wrinkles are, how far back the corners of her mouth moves, and so on. All the subtle details we were never able to capture on a film like Avatar or the Apes movies. That extra detail helped bring little nuances of Rose’s performance into Alita and bring her to life.

“We also solved the hair on her head. As she moves her fingers through her hair, we actually capture every single strand of hair. And detail on her face like pores — we used [deep learning technology] to place pores on her face in a way that flow with her face properly, and put peach fuzz into each hair where the actual pore detail is. And for her eyes, we solved the muscles — the fibrovascular [layer] — it’s like the plane of the iris, which is a bunch of muscle strands. We solve that now in a VFX package, so that we come up with a volume of the muscle to get much higher resolution in the eyes than we have before. That allows us to get proper depth and refraction information.”

To hear more about these and other breakthroughs that enabled the making of Alita: Battle Angel, listen to the podcast file or watch the video above.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

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Podcast: Cinematographer Yves Bélanger, CSC, on Shooting Clint Eastwood’s The Mule Jan 11, 2019

With Clint Eastwood’s longtime cinematographer, Tom Stern, ASC, unavailable, the famed director turned to Canadian cinematographer Yves Bélanger for the first time to shoot his current movie, The Mule, and in the process, gave Bélanger a big thrill.

“I knew [Eastwood’s work] because I have been watching his movies since I was about seven years old and he has been directing since I was about 12 years old, or something like that,” Bélanger recently recalled during a conversation for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series. “I learned a lot, including that I’m not afraid of anything. I worked with the biggest idol of my life, and I wasn’t scared.”

Bélanger got the gig due to his relationship with Eastwood’s longtime camera operator, Stephen Campanelli, an old college buddy from Montreal. “Steve and Clint are friends, and at one point, when they needed someone, I think they just said to each other, ‘Let’s try Bélanger,’” he says. He adds that fitting in with Eastwood’s longtime, established crew “was seamless,” both because of his relationship with Campanelli, who “always told me the way they work,” and because the way Eastwood works is “kind of European.”

“With him, the camera operator is very important, like in Europe,” he says. “The DP is there for the lighting and the general outlook, but the camera operator is the first [line of defense]. So Steve is very important to the process, and the assistant director [David Bernstein] is very important to the process. So I just had to fit in. My goal was to follow Clint’s style, but in a modern way. I tried to be American classic with Clint, which means strong contrasts, but I wanted it to be real. I didn’t want it to look too lit.”

Bélanger explains that this lighting approach was meant to pay homage to Eastwood’s classical lighting style, but with more modern instruments. “Where all his DPs come from is the same [lighting] source, classic lighting, which usually means you use Fresnel lighting, you flag and net and you have to put a fill light out there because Fresnel makes a strong shadow,” he relates. “I wanted to do the same kind of contrast, but with modern lighting, which means lights coming on different windows and use of practicals — using strong but soft light. So you have a contrast, but something softer, nicer for the human face.”

At the end of the day, Bélanger says it all worked out great, that Eastwood was “easy to please,” and “really polite with me.”

To hear full the full podcast conversation about shooting The Mule, listen to the podcast file or watch the video above.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

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Editor Patrick Don Vito on Putting Green Book Together Nov 29, 2018

As director Peter Farrelly began working on his current acclaimed film, Green Book, he quickly found an old colleague knocking at his door, asking to participate. Editor Patrick Don Vito had worked with Farrelly a couple of times in the past, and happened to read the Green Book script before learning his friend was attached to direct it.

“When I read the script, I immediately wanted to talk to Pete about it,” he told StudioDaily contributor Michael Goldman during their recent conversation for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series. “It was the first script I had read in a long time where I felt something reading the script. I cried reading the script, I laughed reading the script — it was unlike anything I had ever seen before.”

Don Vito says that because Green Book is a complex and layered story that dips into multiple genres at the same time “it’s not any one thing.” The movie is based on a true story about a famous African-American pianist, Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), and his concert tour of the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s, where he was chauffeured around by an inelegant Italian-American named Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortenson). A highly unlikely friendship developed between the two.

What’s complicated from an editing point of view is that the movie mixes genres and various elements liberally. Farrelly, directing solo for the first time as well as helming his first drama, wove together comedic and tense dramatic elements. The movie also examines the road trip genre, the buddy movie, issues of racism in America, romance, and a great deal more.

“The challenge of the movie is the tone,” Don Vito states. “We have some really funny things happening, but also some really dramatic and sad things. So how do you go back and forth between those two? That was the hardest part — getting that balance right.”

During the cutting process, Farrelly and Don Vito had an “easy relationship” during which “Pete let me have my space, to play with things. And then, if we were on location [in New Orleans], he would come in on weekends, for a day, just to kind of see where we were at and shape some things. But then he would let me have the week to try stuff. That was the freeing part of it — I was able to look at fresh elements and not have any influence. And then Pete knew what he wanted. But he’s more than happy to let someone take a stab at something, and then, if it is not working, [he goes back to what he originally envisioned].”

The other big challenge involved making tough calls on what beautiful shots from cinematographer Sean Porter, or funny sequences, to leave out of the film during the editing process.

“The first cut was about 2:40,” he says. “I left everything in on the first cut, musical sequences long. Then we realized it can’t be that long, so we slowly started trimming musical sequences. But what seemed to be the catalyst was we wanted to get Tony and Don into the car together as quickly as possible. The solution was trimming the front end of the movie so that we could get them into the car and on the road trip sooner.”

To hear about lots of other issues faced by filmmakers during the editing process, listen to the entire podcast conversation.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

The post Editor Patrick Don Vito on Putting Green Book Together appeared first on Studio Daily.

Cinematographer Linus Sandgren, FSF, Shoots the Moon for First Man Oct 11, 2018

As he finished shooting La La Land, earning himself an Academy Award in the process, cinematographer Linus Sandgren, FSF, learned his next project, also in partnership with director Damien Chazelle, was going to be a far different creature. It was on the set of La La Land that Chazelle first told Sandgren about his next movie — the story of legendary astronaut Neil Armstrong and the events leading up to humanity’s first steps on the moon, called First Man. In those earliest conversations, Chazelle told Sandgren he wanted a gritty, yet stylized, documentary approach to telling what is, simultaneously, an intimate personal portrait and an epic story, all rolled into one.

“Damien was working with [screenwriter] Josh Singer on the script while we were shooting La La Land, and we soon started talking about how he wanted to do the film,” Sandgren recently told contributor Michael Goldman during a conversation for Studio’s Podcasts from the Front Lines series. “He wanted to approach it in a documentary style kind of way, which I was very intrigued by since it was the counter opposite of La La Land. So one of the very first things we talked about was that we had to tell the story about these [famous] events, and yet show the backstory that [the public] is not that familiar with, where we see the sacrifice and hard work all these people put into the [Apollo 11 moon mission]. He wanted to do it in an authentic way, so he felt a type of documentary approach, where we could go handheld with zooms, would [help achieve] some sort of authenticity, and he also wanted it to feel like it was true to the period. Those two visions made him come up with this idea of shooting Super 16mm in cinéma vérité style. But it evolved as we were talking into something else, as well, where we wanted to capture different aspects of the film in different ways.”

Thus, filmmakers strategically utilized a mixture of Super 16mm, 35mm, and Imax film formats for different sections of the movie. But, at its foundation, Sandgren says, “we still wanted to think about it as a 16mm type documentary from the ’60s or ’70s, but with a more cinematic approach in terms of storytelling with the camera.”

Among the many challenges posed by the project was how best to light various sections. Overall, a general principle employed, according to Sandgren, was to “maintain the aesthetics of ’70s filmmakers like Gordon Willis and Alan J. Pakula and their films,” he says. “We wanted to be a little more cinematically expressive than just [lighting] as though it were a documentary without thinking about it. In our case, we wanted to work with solitude and death as themes. Therefore, for lighting, we wanted to work with black blacks, with going black being a theme for death. So making it all realistic was a basic goal for lighting, but cinematically expressive.”

The biggest lighting challenge involved the moon landing sequences, since realism was such an important requirement. Sandgren says filmmakers decided to shoot the moon scenes outside at night on a gigantic set created by production designer Nathan Crowley at a massive rock quarry in the Atlanta area. The problem, however, was figuring out what kind of lighting would allow Sandgren to light in a way that replicated the movement and impact of the sun hitting the moon as it actually did during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969.

“During the moon mission, the height of the sun was always the same,” he says. “So lighting with multiple sources to cover the entire area would, I thought, look fake. Therefore my goal was to light it all with one single source, to create one single shadow. We did tests with Luminys, which makes the Softsun, which is a 100,000-watt lamp. We put two together, about 500 feet away, to see how it would look. It was pretty good, but a little soft shadow, though. So I asked [Luminys Chairman/CTO] David Pringle, who was there for the test, to explain, could he make a 200K version? He got quite inspired and came back to me the next day and said they could make one. That was what we really needed to get the exposure right and also get a single source.”

That was hardly the end of the innovation in terms of the cinematography on First Man. To hear more about the challenges and solutions involved with the project, listen to the full podcast conversation.

Look for a new episode of Podcasts from the Front Lines every month at StudioDaily.com. Visit our archive of past episodes for more stories from the trenches of modern movie-making.

The post Cinematographer Linus Sandgren, FSF, Shoots the Moon for First Man appeared first on Studio Daily.

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