Oscars preview: Deep dive on nominations in Cinematography, Editing and VFX

IBC

article here

Films shot on film, fake AI controversy, a collection of CG apes, and a trio of nods to Robbie Williams make the list of nominees for Cinematography, Editing and VFX Academy Awards.

Robbie Williams has his paw prints all over the Oscars. In Netflix’ 13 times nominated genre-bending musical drama Emilia Pérez, his 2013 song ‘Swing Supreme’ plays at a dinner party scene in London that marks a crucial turning point in the characters' lives.

The credits roll and the needle drops on former band Take That’s ‘Greatest Day’ while the camera tracks down a lineup of fishnet-clad dancers at the start of 6 times nominated Anora.

And, of course, in Better Man Williams thumbs his nose at the establishment in a biopic which receives a single Oacar nod for the VFX rendition of the pop minstrel as a chimp.

Three of the five nominations for Cinematography are shot on old school celluloid keeping up the astonishing hit ratio of Awards nominated movies shot on film which is around 5% of all films shot every year.

AI also features this year in several nominations including de-aging faces (Alien: Romulus) and finessing vocal performances (Emilia Perez and The Brutalist). In each case the storytelling is definitively enhanced by use of AI and the control and creativity is unconditionally in the hands of the filmmakers. There should be no fuss over this. AI is a tool, just like any other tool used to create emotion and empathy by storytellers.

That aside, let’s take a closer look at three crafts categories.

Best Cinematography

While resuscitating the antique VistaVision 35mm format garnered attention among celluloid purists, it’s the poetic intensity of The Brutalist’s imagery that stuns.

Laurie ‘Lol’ Crawley, the British cinematographer who shot Chris Morris’ Four Lions and Noah Baumbach’s big budget White Noise, also photographed director Brady Corbet’s previous films.

“The films we’ve shot are like an unofficial trilogy touching on the contrast between antiquity and modernity,” he said. “We like to work in low light. We like to underexpose the film. We like to push process it. We linger up close on spaces and characters, so when we finally crack wide open in Carrara, and on the construction site as the Institute takes shape, it’s what you’ve thirsted for all along — the psychological effect of finally being able to breathe.”

Previously nominated for his work on Robert Eggers’ 2020 feature The Lighthouse, Jarin Blaschke crafts a visual language that transforms the black of night into a vehicle of poetic sentiment and potential terror in Nosferatu.

The scene when Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) finds himself at a crossroads in a dense forest is a prime example and was shot, like the whole film, on Kodak VISION3 500T Colour Negative.

“When you examine how moonlight illuminates things, there is very little colour information," Blaschke explains. “My aim was to try to recreate the same wavelengths that our eyes see under those low-light conditions when only the rod cells in our eyes are working. I used a filter to eliminate all the yellow and red light, along with most of the green. What was left was a pretty much a B&W image made out of only blue-cyan densities that were desaturated to near monochrome in the grade. I think it’s my best night exterior so far.”

On paper the fusion of musical melodrama and thriller set in Mexico but filmed in France has no right to work but miraculously Emilia Perez blends together. French DP Paul Guilhaume describes the work as “like a chimera” and that director Jacques Audiard’s wanted “an aesthetic of movement.”

“In the cinematography it’s obvious. If the camera is too static, he won’t be happy, something in the image has to have motion. If not the camera then maybe it’s the light. If it’s not the light, maybe it’s the performance of the dancers. You could extend this to music or editing to the general rhythm of the film and even to the script - you always have something going in motion.”

It’s no mean feat to follow up a huge hit with an even bigger sequel but Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two achieved this for Warner Bros netting over $700m in box office receipts, some $300m more than Part One. While Villeneuve is strangely not nominated, DP Greig Fraser – who won the Oscar for Part One – is.

One of Fraser’s ideas was that sunlight in the Harkonnen’s world would kill colour. He shot scenes featuring Austin Butler’s psychopath Feyd-Rautha with an IR camera that could only see Infra Red lights and a second camera that could only record light from LED lights to drain colour and produce that stark monochromatic sequence.

Read more: Behind the Scenes - Dune: Part Two

The Academy loves to award work shot on film and equally loves venerable artisans which is why Lachman’s artful camerawork on Maria, has scored the only nomination for Pablo Larraín’s biopic of the opera singer Maria Callas. Lachman has been photographing films since the 1970s for luminaries including Werner Hezog and Jean Luc Godard and has enjoyed a late career renaissance with Oscar nominations for Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015) and Larraín’s satire El Conde (2023) and a lifetime achievement award at Camerimage this year.

Maria is gorgeous to look at, shot on a combination of 16mm and 35mm, mostly in Hungary standing in for Paris, and one key location in the Milan opera house La Scala where Callas had sung. “I knew we needed a stronger spotlight on Maria (Angeline Jolie) so we had that light resting in the elevator ready to go up to the lighting booth as soon as our four hours began,” he recalled. “That was the most difficult thing for me to do on this film because of the tight time frame, the multiple scenes we had there and because primarily it is shot with Steadicam.”

Best Editing

Votes would have been cast for Corbet Brady’s staggering The Brutalist before it got into hot water following news that AI had been used to finesse the Hungarian dialect spoken by leads Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. It was faux outrage principally caused by ignorant social media pundits who had not seen the film. In fact, as editor Dávid Jancsó outlined to Red Shark in the only published interview he has given so far, “It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot.” The Brutalist is a masterclass in filmmaking with powerful performances fully justifying its 215 minutes run time.

Sean Baker, the American auteur responsible for sex worker comedy drama Anora, was also the subject of some controversy when certain craft guilds proved reluctant to credit him as editor. Make no mistake, this is Baker’s movie, made in vérité and improvisational style notably with best actress nominee Mikey Madison, supporting actor nominee Yura Borisov and cinematographer Drew Daniels. Baker chooses to make his films outside of the studio system and retain total creative control.

Anora was producer Samantha Quan (also Baker’s wife) who suggested using Take That after searching for the words ‘Greatest Day’ on Spotify. “It was such an ear worm that we were humming it after the first listen,” he explained to CinemaEditor. “The lyrics were so on the nose but celebratory. I threw it on the opening credits and it was one of those serendipitous moments where it felt like it was written for the film. The tempo was the same as two other songs we’d choreographed to. Then, when the camera moves up to Mikey, it timed with the chorus and it just seemed perfect.”

Behind the Scenes: Anora

For Jacques Audiard’s go-to editor Juliette Welfling the London-set dinner party in Emilia Perez marks the start of a new chapter in the story.

“The editing of the first part of the scene is focused on efficiency, but for the sung part, emotion alone guided the cut,” she explained to CinemaEditor. “We stay in close-up, shot-reverse-shot of the two women, with minimal cutting in the editing. They are like the only two people in the world; that’s what we want the audience to feel. It’s a very emotional moment. After this scene, everything will be different.”

Director Edward Berger and British editor Nick Emerson had no intention of turning Papal succession drama Conclave into another Da Vinci Code. Conspiracy thrillers like All The Presidents Men were a template.

“You have to know when to deliver information and when to withhold it,” Emerson explained to CinemaEditor. “It’s important to give the audience the chance to construct something in their own head because then it’s just a much more rewarding experience for them.” Emerson also supervised final mix so he could attend to details in the sound. “It’s generally such a hushed picture that paper rustling sounds like bombs going off.”

In his sixth project with director Jon Chu, editor Myron Kerstein embarked on perhaps the biggest film of his career. Wicked was filmed back-to-back with Part 2 due this year.

“Practically every shot was going to have VFX, and I had little to no experiences cutting a film with the amount we would end up in the film. It was a huge learning curve but I was excited to use my instincts in smaller films and apply it to this scale.”

Kerstein also took over the editing of additional storyboards and pre-vis sequences liaising with department heads including DP Alice Brooks and music supervisor Maggie Rodford.

Read more: Behind the Scenes: Wicked

Best VFX

If Gladiator 2 with its crazed baboons were nominated we’d almost have a full house of monkey magic. As it is, just three in this category feature CG simians.

Wētā FX led the work on 20th Century Studio’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes just as it has on the previous three of the rebooted franchise. Despite great acclaim for its work fusing photoreal CG with performance capture it has never won. Over 1,000 crew worked on more than 1,500 shots. Indeed, fewer than 40 scenes in the entire film have any VFX. And 33 minutes of the film are entirely digital.

ILM’s production supervisor Pablo Helman leant into the magical realism of the Land of Oz for Universal’s musical smash Wicked. A highlight for Helman was devising the transformation of armoured guard Chistery from ape an ape with wings.

“I love the fact that it’s painful,” Helman told IndieWire. “He loves birds and wants to secretly be like a bird and fly, and this shows how painful it would be to do that.”

Framestore’s work on the film’s 2500 VFX shots was led by VFX Supervisor and Creative Director Jonathan Fawkner and included animal characters like the goat professor Doctor Dillamond. For this reference footage was shot with a puppeteer acting the part opposite the actors before Peter Dinklage’s vocal and facial performance was animated over the top.

Since Robbie Williams sees himself as a performing monkey, according to director Micheal Gracey, it seemed logical to have Wētā perform its monkey magic on his portrayal in Better Man.

“It’s not how you would shoot a VFX movie,” says Keith Herft, VFX Supervisor. Usually, you try to make it as sterile and controllable in post as possible. This was not that.”

Actor Jonno Davis’ performance was captured by Weta with the CG simian overlaid. “We’ve never done a singing ape so we had to do a lot of motion studies to work out how you convincingly make all that sound and energy come out of this cg character,” explained Dave Clayton animation supervisor. “It’s much more than moving the lips. It’s the chest, the posture, the strain in the eyes.”

I looked hard but couldn’t find any simians in Alien: Romulus though there is a bastard child of the famous Xenomorph that mixes equal parts Nosferatu’s Count Orloc and the body horror of The Substance. ILM, Image Engine, Tippett Studio, and Wētā were the VFX and special effects shops which joined forces to create the multiple Aliens and facehuggers attacking Gen Z on a derelict space ship for director Fede Álvarez. AI specialist Metaphysic helped bring back the voice and de-aged face of Ian Holm as Rook, the paranoid android.

VFX supervisor Paul Lambert and the team at Dneg won the Oscar for the mammoth world building on Dune: Part One and are nominated again for Part Two. Their work includes the iconic scene of Paul Atreides riding the gargantuan sandworm and achieving close to the status of messiah.

“Denis gave this incredible pitch which was: For a Freman to get onto a worm he had to climb a dune, the worm would burst through the dune, the Freman would go down with the sand and land on the worm,” Lambert tells VFXVoice. “We never went into how you get off a worm! That could be for later. It was like, ‘Oh, my god, what an absolutely incredible idea! How the heck do we do that?’”

Nominees for Best Film are Anora; The Brutalist; Conclave; Dune: Part Two; Emilia Pérez; I’m Still Here; The Substance; Wicked as well as A Complete Unknown and Nickel Boys.

The Oscar race is filled with apes, led by Wētā FX’s work on both “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” and “Better Man” and Framestore’s baboons in “Gladiator II” and ILM’s flying monkeys in “Wicked.” And let’s not forget MPC’s Rafiki in “Mufasa: The Lion King.”

Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part 2” (Warner Bros.) is more exciting and emotional, with Paul (Timothée Chalamet) leading the nomadic Fremen in a holy war on Arrakis. VFX supervisor Paul Lambert and his Oscar-winning “Dune” DNEG team ramped up everything with much more visceral action, particularly with Paul and the Fremen riding the massive CG sandworms into battle against the Sardaukar. For Paul’s first ride, they created a separate “worm” unit, in which Chalamet stood on a platform with gimbals designed by SFX supervisor Gerd Nefzer as the sandworm set piece, with gripping devices imitating the Fremen hooks, and surrounded by an industrial fan that blew sand on the set.

For the Vatican-confined psychological thriller Conclave British editor Nick Emerson applied a rigorous discipline to build tension in Edward Berger’s Papal fight for succession.

“There had to be a reason for a shot and a reason for which shot follows the next. We tried not to revisit the same frame or set up if we could avoid it,”.

French DP Stéphane Fontaine claims he didn’t approach the script for Papal succession drama Conclave as a whodunnit. “The moment you start to think in terms of genre your mind is suddenly closing doors or opening others. I never thought in terms of mystery or suspense but in terms of tension and expression of doubt as seen exclusively from the point of view of Cardinal Lawrence [Ralph Fiennes].”

The opening scenes include a 360-degree Steadicam showing the chaos that Lawrence is facing, after which the film’s language is more restrained. “The sense of power had to be translated by the composition of the frames,” Fontaine explained. “We had to suggest as opposed to stress what we thought viewers should know. We wanted to translate the sense of unease caused by this somewhat suffocating atmosphere into the visuals. We extensively used the widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio, either by packing the frames or by isolating characters.”

Behind the Scenes: Conclave

DIR

sean baker

mangold

brady

em perx

substance..

anora

brutalist

comlete unk

conclave

dune 2

em perez

Im still here

Nickel b

Substan

wicked

Wicked

“Emilia Pérez,” the musical crime thriller from Jacques Audiard, stars Zoe Saldaña as a disgruntled lawyer who assists the titular Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) in undergoing gender confirmation surgery. The director audaciously offers an operatic fever dream about the hope of a new life through song and dance — but it’s also about the difficulty in leading double lives. finds the proper operatic rhythm and pacing to accommodate the different stylistic mixtures.

Bold premise aside, the drama is audacious on several levels, not least in playing amid a backdrop of original songs by Clément Ducol and Camille and dance choreographed by Damien Jalet. It features four potent female performances (who won an ensemble best actress award at Cannes where the film premiered) including Zoe Saldaña (as the lawyer, Rita) and first transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón as the title character.

The director’s previous work includes Rust and Bone, Deephan, The Sisters Brothers, The Prophet, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Paris, 13^th District all edited by Juliette Welfling (accumulating five César Awards for Best Editing). The French artist also cut The Hunger Games, Ocean’s Eight and Free State of Jones for director Gary Ross and was Oscar nominated for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).

Welfling says didn’t the director didn't provide any specific description of the film’s genre. “I knew that it was a musical comedy but the script evolved from being conventional in the beginning to something very different by the end,” she says. “It went through all kinds of genres that sort of mix and match throughout the film. It's drama, it's a soap opera, it's film noir, a love story, a musical comedy. It's a whole mix of so many different things in ways that are unexpected, maybe weird or strange. I have the impression that it doesn't really look like any other film that one may have seen before because there's such a mix.

“We switched from one genre to another, everything is intentionally fluid. Everything felt possible and there wasn't any sort of frame around what we could do.”

The first scene soon erupts into a song and dance led by Rita as she passionately argues the case for the prospection of a wife beater. The composition and choreography drives the narrative. It’s set in a busy night time street market and sets the template for the musical numbers that follow.

“It’s a complicated scene which Zoe makes seem very easy,” Welfling says. “She is singing, dancing and acting and her performance is remarkable. I selected the things that foreground her performance. More than that we wanted to be true to her character’s spirit. I didn't want to impose too many cuts. If I watch a movie musical I’m often struck by how much the song and dance is cut too much and then I start thinking it's not that actor dancing for real, that's not authentic; it’s a fake.

“So the longer we stay on a shot then the easier it is for the audience to believe in the performer. That was sort of a guiding principle for us.”

There were however constraints. The scene was largely shot single camera with choreography and camera timed so precisely as to offer few options in the edit.

For all musical numbers the chief challenge was to transition in and out of them in a way that would make the songs feel integral to story.

“Most of the time what we wanted was for the viewer not to perceive a transition. For example, in the scene where the surgeon (played by Mark Ivanir) breaks into a song, mid-shot. When he starts singing, there's no music at all. He's singing acapella without orchestration.”

She continues, “Normally, when a song arrives in a musical it arrives abruptly. Since the lyrics of the songs are dialogue in our movie we wanted them to arrive unexpectedly obtrusively.”

A later set piece where Rita accosts male guests at a fundraising event was challenging in this regard since the beginning of the scene had featured some shots that were designed to be spectacular.

“Zoe looks incredible in her red dress but if we used those shots at the beginning the audience would know right away that she was going to break out into a song and we didn't want that. We wanted for the viewer to be surprised.”

Crafting the character of Manitas/Emilia Pérez was another editorial tightrope. The audience gradually warm to her as they empathize with her plight even as they are horrified by what he might do to Rita on their first encounter, alone and with a hood over her ahead, trapped on the drug lord’s bus.

“In practical terms, that Zoe had a hood over her head for part of this sequence meant we could change the dialogue any way we wanted, which we did to some extent. As far as Manitas is concerned, you see the rings on his hands and the gleam of his teeth. I didn't want the viewer to see him right away. I delayed that moment as much as possible, just as Rita only glimpses him and we hear her deep breathing and how scared she is. By just showing little pieces and wider shots we make out his face and discover him.”

Overall, Welfling says she tries to edit based on how the character feels in each situation. “I edit with my heart. I try to put myself in the character's shoes and therefore to try to have the viewer feel what each character feels. That is my only knowledge of what editing is. I don't have any rules for building a scene, nor am I interested in rules.”

What then are to we make of Rita’s decision to acquiesce in Manitas’ request to secretly transition to a new identity?

“When we meet Rita she's sort of a slave to her boss, a male attorney. She's the one who does all the work, and he's the one who takes all the glory. She's considered to be less than nothing. So when the opportunity presents itself to make a lot of money she tells herself, she has nothing to lose. When she finds herself alone with Manitas she realizes that these are not good people, but there’s something about her story that rings true. If Rita believes in universal social justice then her proposition shouldn’t be denied just because of who she is.”

A dinner party in London is a key scene that marks the beginning of the second part of the film. It’s a crucial turning point in the characters' lives. “To emphasize that we’re entering a new chapter, we chose to open the sequence with the song ‘Swing Supreme,’ by Robbie Williams, which is very different from the musical style of the rest of the film.

“At the moment of revelation, the lights go out and we’re suddenly immersed into the intimacy of Emilia and Rita, allowing us to escape from realism. As Rita sings, she goes from surprise to terror to compassion, while Emilia sings her story in a heartbreaking way. The editing of the first part of the scene is focused on efficiency, but for the sung part, emotion alone guided the cut. We stay in close-up, shot-reverse-shot of the two women, with minimal cutting in the editing. They are like the only two people in the world; that’s what we want the audience to feel. It’s a very emotional moment. After this scene, everything will be different.”

The film is France's selection for best international feature Oscar yet it’s almost entirety told in Spanish language and set in Mexico City. Welfling says understands a little Spanish but that this wasn’t an issue. In fact, it helped. All dailies were subtitled in French and if she had a problem she’d translate it on her iPhone.

“Jacques says he likes to make movies in a language that he doesn't speak natively because to him, when it's in French, he finds he is searching for the subtext. But when it's in a language he doesn't understand he's listening to the music of the language. Spanish is such a beautiful, lyrical language that I let myself go and tried to cut this movie rhythmically. To me, the fact that it's in a language, where I don't immediately connect with the meaning, meant I thought more about the musicality of it.”

The final third switches the story’s focus from Rita to the title character. Emilia’s story gathers pace around her children, her work, her conflict with ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and her love affair with Epifanía (Adriana Paz).

“Whereas Rita goes through fewer experiences in that part of the film it was very important for us not to lose her. We tried to move some scenes around so that Rita wouldn’t disappear from the story, even while she has to take a step back to foreground Emilia’s story.”

ends

Conclave Edward Berger’s follow-up to “All Quiet on the Western Front,” is a

in which Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal searches for a successor to the deceased Pope, who harbored a dark secret. Editor Nick Emerson handles the slow burn of all the claustrophobic machinations of selecting a Pope in a sequestered enclave in the Vatican, moving the mystery along in the confined setting, with the added drama concerning a crisis of faith for Fiennes.

He adds, “One of the challenges of the film is that it's very claustrophobic. We had to keep the outside world out because that's what these men and some women are experiencing. They're just locked away.”

No one who nakedly wants to be the Pope should be the Pope but sitting on the fence is not an option either. “This is a war. You have to pick a side,” Ralph Fiennes’ Cardinal Lawrence is warned when leading the selection of a new head of the Catholic Church in a secretive process known as the conclave.

Edward Berger’s follow up to the Oscar winning All Quiet on the Western Front is equally as epic but altogether more confined, just as the Cardinals are constrained by their cassocks and the rituals of their faith within the Vatican’s oppressive walls.

Joining Fiennes in vying for Papal supremacy are Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto and Lucian Msamati playing a Nigerian priest, who could become the first African pontiff in history. A Catholic priest from Afghanistan (played by Carlos Diehz) also awakens racial prejudice. Isabella Rossellini’s nun pricks the conscience of the Church’s male hierarchy.

Berger’s choice of editor is Britain’s Nick Emerson whose credits include David Mackenzie’s Starred Up, Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool and the last two features of director William Oldroyd, Lady Macbeth and Eileen.

Emerson’s agent had sent him Peter Straughan’s (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) script adapted from Robert Harris’ 2016 novel. Aside from the chance of working with Berger, Emerson’s interest was piqued by producer Tessa Ross with whom he had worked on BBC TV series Life After Life.

“I knew this was something I should pay attention to because Tessa is has amazing taste and I had a really great experience working with her,” says Emerson. “I’ve a background in documentary where so much about the editing is a response to the material that's put in front of you. That's the way I treat feature films. I tend not to overread the script too much either. I’ll read it a few times then just respond to what I feel and what the director is saying.”

In their first meeting editor and director shared similar responses. “The first thing that struck me was how this political thriller harked back to those ‘70s conspiracy films like All The Presidents Men and The Parallax View.

“What I loved about those films was the rigor and discipline in the way they're cut and shot. They are very deliberate and composed and not terribly cutty, if you will. I just happened to mention these films in conversation with Edward and that seemed to chime as references for him in terms of the disciplined way he wanted to approach Conclave.

Those films (Three Days Of The Condor is another) treat the audience with intelligence, sharing just enough information without spoon feeding. Berger and Emerson had no intention of turning Conclave into another Da Vinci Code.

“Somebody once said that when editing you've got to assume at every point that the audience are ahead of you,” Emerson observes. “Audiences are smart. They can they can glean so much information even from simple things like if you decide to hold onto a shot a little longer or cut to another shot a bit shorter than anticipated.

“You have to know when to deliver information and when to withhold it. It’s okay to leave an audience confused for several minutes before they get really frustrated. You've got to be bold. It’s important to give the audience the chance to construct something in their own head because then it’s just a much more rewarding experience for them.”

The machinations of the Vatican’s game of thrones could be applied to any fight for succession from board room to White House. Emerson says he and Berger didn't discuss any specific election but did talk about the corruption at the heart of predominantly male power structures. “Political campaigns everywhere can be terribly self-serving which I think you can see in the film. Everybody says what people want to hear but they operate their own agenda.

“I remember thinking when we'd wrapped that it will probably release about the time of the U.S election and that it would have additional resonance with North American audiences.”

Emerson visited the sets of the Sistine Chapel and Casa Santa Marta at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios but was mostly based at edit rooms in London.

“I spent some weekends there while Edward was shooting. That can be useful, because there are times when you want to sit the director down at the end of the shooting day and show them something. On the other hand being distant from set can help keep your work very objective.

“We’d always speak by phone or via text. Edward is a brilliant communicator. He’s very good at describing what he wants to see or why something isn’t working. In editorial he was in suite with me most days and it was it was brilliant. He is very open to my ideas and to experimentation. Sometimes he’d say ‘let's test the limits of what we can do’. ‘Is the music too loud?’ Well, let's test the limits. ‘Can we hold this shot any longer?’ Let's test the limits’. I just loved the freedom of not being afraid to try those things.”

The story is told from the point of view of Fiennes’ character who is often presented in close-up or medium shots. “He has a personal journey through the film. He has devoted his life to the church but is having a crisis of faith so we needed to anchor the story around him.”

Berger and DP Stéphane Fontaine (Jackie) also employ shots looking down on an actor but from the side. “What this does is create this incredible tension that you're almost trying to peer around the screen to see what's going on in their eyes,” Emerson says. “The grammar of the shot is very unconventional and can be really provocative when you cut to it. Because they pack a punch we had to be judicious about when use them. The same with regular close-ups. It's about choosing exactly the right moment to move in close.”

That’s tricky with a cast of performers as expert as these. “I was obsessed by The English Patient and I’ve admired Ralph’s work ever since,” Emerson says. “He has incredible range and variation but there’s always a real solid consistency of truth. You’re never not going to be able to cut to Ralph because he's always going to be giving you something.”

A sequence in which more than 100 cardinals cast their votes over three days presented the filmmakers with a challenge. Since each cardinal writes a name and drops a ballot in an urn the question was how to make it compelling each time?

Storyboards and pre-vis assured that each of the six sequences would be unique. “When I was putting together a first cut I could very clearly see what Edward’s intentions were. We knew that if we played the first vote out almost in real time then that gave us permission to change it up next time. Obviously, he shot them very differently so that they didn't feel repetitious. They felt like new scenes and new days.

“The aim was to propel the movie forward, instead of stopping the action. We did a lot of cross-cutting. We could marry some up to a prior dramatic moment. We could accelerate the pace and create - for want a better word a ‘montage’ - to show several different voting strands going on at once.

“The temptation was to think we've got all these shots from the first vote so can we steal a shot from there to put into another voting sequence? We were very careful about not doing that because we wanted to build a sequence that was structurally very sound. When you pay attention to the form like this it creates a real tension and excitement for the audience.”

British editor Joe Walker nets his fourth Oscar nomination, having won in 2022 for Part One which had already done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of story.

“In Part One we had the burden of explaining where humanity is in 25,000 years’ time. It gives us the possibility [in Part Two] to be more action-adventure driven.” Keys to his work lay in balancing the intimate relationships between Paul Atredis and Chani, or Paul and his mother, with the immense scale of Grieg Fraser’s imagery and Hans Zimmer’s bone-scrubbing score.

Behind the Scenes - Dune: Part Two

Editing

Frontrunners

Challengers?
Conclave – interviewed for CE
Dune: Part Two – Joe W – at IBC
Emilia Pérez – interviewed for CE
Wicked – myron (ce)

The Brutalist- covered at redsjs

Anora (covered in (ibc)

“A Complete Unknown” (Searchlight Pictures)

Behind the Scenes - Dune: Part Two

Editing

Anora - Sean Baker
Conclave - Nick Emerson
Dune: Part Two - Joe Walker
Emilia Pérez - Juliette Welfling
Kneecap - Julian Ulrichs, Chris Gill

Cinematography

“The Brutalist” (A24) *** - covered ibc
“A Complete Unknown” (Searchlight Pictures) – covered ibc
“Conclave” (Focus Features) – covered ibc
“Maria” (Netflix) got coverage
“Nosferatu” (Focus Features) – not!

Cinematography

The Brutalist - Lol Crawley
Conclave - Stéphane Fontaine
Dune: Part Two - Greig Fraser
Emilia Pérez - Paul Guilhaume
Nosferatu - Jarin Blaschke

n Nosferatu, filmmaker Robert Eggers brings a classic tale of obsession to life. When Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent to Romania to close a real estate deal with the ancient Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), he unknowingly sets off a wave of terror that affects everyone around him, especially his wife (Lily-Rose Depp). Nosferatu is a haunting epic of visual beauty and visceral horror with a cast that includes Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe.

he The Hollywood Reporter writes, “Blaschke’s camerawork is spellbinding—fluid, graceful, and maleficent in its command of chiaroscuro lighting, threatening shadows, and the dense soup of darkness.”

Nosferatu is only in theaters December 25, so get tickets now!

The official trailer for Nosferatu

When did you start thinking about Nosferatu?

We started talking about it in 2015 after The Witch came out.

Did the story change much?

From what I remember of the first draft of the script, I don't think the film we made is all that different, at least in terms of content. But if we had made it in 2015, it probably would have looked a lot different because our technique has evolved since then.

What did you hope to bring out cinematically in the film?

For me, the most important thing was to realize Rob's vision, otherwise, there's not much point remaking it. If the film was too homage-y to Murnau’s original, it would not feel like we had anything new to say. Even if it's the same story with most of the same characters—although Rob gave some of the characters like Ellen more emphasis—we didn't want our film to look like the other films. When Rob told me that it needed it to feel romantic, that gave me the direction that I needed.

What was your biggest challenge?

Probably our biggest challenge was having so many of the interior scenes shot with the lights off. Rob seems to give me a challenge like this in every film. In The Witch, we had children shut up in a goat’s shed. In The Lighthouse, we had to shoot the actors under the table with the lights out. In The Northman, the main character is in a shed again with no lights and no fire. In this movie, there's page after page of dialogue where people are in spaces with no lights. This pushed me to test the limits of moonlight and to shoot scenes with no lights that looked real.

In the castle, you have to create the sense of different times of the day.

On the stage, we tried to make the different lighting as believable as possible, letting you feel that daylight was coming in, even though it was not. To get the right look of sunset and sunrise, I did a lot of research into the actual relative size of the sun and the ratios that would play inside the room at different times of the day. It was a lot of fun making sunrises and sunsets from scratch on the stage.

In so many of the night scenes, you gave the darkness a sense of real beauty.

What you see with your eye doesn’t look the same when you try to capture it on film. You have to expose the film at a certain ratio for it to react in a certain way but that is not the same way you react to it in real life. In the moonlit scenes, for example, there is very little color information. I had to observe how my own brain and eyes saw things in a low-light situation. At that level, humans don't really see color. It is just your rods and not your cones working. I used a filter to eliminate all yellow and red light as well as most of the green. What was left was mostly blue, which made everything look a certain way. In shooting, I’m just trying to recreate the same wavelengths that your eyes would see under those conditions.

How did you collaborate with the costume designer and production designer to craft a palette that would work in low light?

In the dark, you really have to compress the tones that you are photographing, which means everything on the set would need to be within the range of tones that can be seen at night. Sometimes Linda [Muir, the costume designer] would have to create a very expensive garment that would look great in daylight and enhance the low light conditions at night. Linda would make black coats as off-black as she could or put something that shines in a blouse so that it would stand out when it is backlit or illuminated by fire, anything to keep the costumes from looking like a black mess on screen. Likewise, a white nightgown could not be too white because it would stick out too much in a night scene. Everything had to be gradations of light and dark.

Lily-Rose Depp in Nosferatu

Were there certain colors that you avoided?

Can you talk a little about the framing?

Rob likes very symmetrical compositions. He has a very keen sense of classical composition. Indeed, his style was very compatible with the aesthetic and worldview of the people in the movie. We referenced some of the art of the period—like the paintings of Casper David Friedrich. When I thought about a Romantic aesthetic, I thought more about American contemporaries like Frederic Church. But they were all strands of the same movement.

What about camera movement?

For the most part, it was controlled or static. But in the castle, the camera tends to lead the character. It would appear that the camera was with the character, but then it would veer off and show us something else before returning to the character. It would create the sense of an omniscient camera. The character would appear in the frame when you wouldn't expect him to. We would do these kinds of things to give the photography a kind of off feeling.

It feels like much of the camera work reflects the sensibility of the early 19th century.

Yes. It is removed and formal with lots of profile shots. It often feels mannered in the way that people are brought into the frame—all of which can feel a little stifling but I think it really works in this film.

VFX

), the long-awaited adaptation of the Broadway musical fantasy by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, tells us how the Wicked Witch and Glinda the Good Witch became rivals. In this origin story, an unlikely friendship forms between Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), a compassionate girl with green skin, and the conceited Galinda (Ariana Grande) at Shiz University in the Land of Oz.

Wicked

Universal Pictures

Pablo Helman, Jonathan Fawkner, Paul Corbould, David Shirk

standing VFX, environment (the Arrakeen Basin), CG cinematography, model (the Harkonnen Harvester), effects simulation (including the wormriding), compositing and lighting and emerging tech (Nuke CopyCat). "Kingdom" is up for awards in the categories of outstanding VFX, character (doubled nominated for Noa and Raka), CG cinematography, effects simulation (including the rapids and floods) and compositing and lighting.

Several of the VFX contenders come from franchises with a history at the VES Awards and Academy Awards. Among them is "Dune: Part 2," whose work, like 2021's "Dune," was led by three-time Oscar winning VFX supervisor Paul Lambert and VFX company DNEG. "Dune" won the top VES Award and the VFX Oscar.

RIDING ON THE BACK OF GIANTS FOR DUNE: PART TWO - VFX Voice MagazineVFX Voice Magazine

"Dune: Part 2" leads the 23rd Visual Effects Society Awards feature competition with seven nominations including outstanding VFX in a photoreal feature. It's followed by "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes," with six nominations, and "Better Man," with four noms.

All three movies, along with "Mufasa: The Lion King" (three total VES noms) and "Twisters" (two noms) will compete in the top category for outstanding VFX in a photoreal feature.

Rounding out the top category, "Better Man" features VFX led by Weta and "Twisters," by Industrial Light & Magic.

"Better Man" is a contender in the categories of outstanding VFX, character (Robbie Williams, who is portrayed as a chimp), CG cinematography, and composting and lighting. "Mufasa" is a contender for outstanding VFX, character (Taka) and emerging tech (real-time interactive filmmaking); and "Twisters," for outstanding VFX and effects simulation (for the twisters).

VFX

1	Dune: Part Two	Warner Bros.	Paul Lambert, Stephen James, Rhys Salcombe, Gerd Nefzer
2	Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes	20th Century Studios	Erik Winquist, Stephen Unterfranz, Paul Story, Rodney Burke
3	Wicked	Universal Pictures	Pablo Helman, Jonathan Fawkner, Paul Corbould, David Shirk
4	Deadpool & Wolverine	Marvel Studios	Swen Gillberg, Matthew Twyford, Vincent Papaix, Dominic Tuohy
5	Alien: Romulus	20th Century Studios	Eric Barba, Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser, Daniel Macarin, Shane Patrick Mahan

6	Better Man	Paramount Pictures	Luke Miller, David Clayton, Keith Herft, Peter Stubbs
7	Civil War	A24	David Simpson, J.D. Schwalm, Chris Zeh, Freddy Salazar
8	Gladiator II	Paramount Pictures	Mark Bakowski, Pietro Ponti, Nikki Penny, Neil Corbould
9	Twisters	Universal Pictures	Olivier Beaulieu, Bill Georgiou, Ben Snow, Florian Witzel
10	Mufasa: The Lion King	Walt Disney Pictures	Audrey Ferrara, Adam Valdez

exclusively reported the internal top 20 finalists shared among the branch members. The branch didn’t fall in line for artificial intelligence and de-aging with Sony Pictures’ “Here” or the sandy effects of Warner Bros’ “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” Instead, they opted for the grim reality of Alex Garland’s “Civil War” and the devastating tornados of Lee Isaac Chung’s “Twisters.”

This could be a tight race between “Dune: Part Two,” “Gladiator II” and “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.” This is also where “Wicked” can show its strength in the crafts categories.

Better Man”
“Dune: Part Two”
“Gladiator II”
“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”
“Wicked”

The Best Visual Effects Oscar shortlist from December 17 includes “Alien: Romulus,” “Better Man,” “Civil War,” “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Dune: Part Two,” “Gladiator II,” “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” “Mufasa: The Lion King,” “Twisters,” and “Wicked.”

The drama nominees went to “Civil War” (Jake Roberts), “Conclave” (Nick Emerson), “Dune: Part Two” (Joe Walker), “Emilia Pérez” (Juliette Welfling), and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” (Eliot Knapman, Margaret Sixel).

The comedy nominees consisted of “Anora” (director Sean Baker), “Challengers” (Marco Costa), “A Real Pain” (Robert Nassau), “The Substance” (Coralie Fargeat, Jérôme Eltabet, Valentin Féron), and “Wicked” (Myron Kerstein).

Among the snubs were “The Brutalist,” “Gladiator II,” “Nickel Boys,” “A Complete Unknown,” “Blitz,” and “September 5.”

In “Dune: Part Two” (Warner Bros.), Oscar-winning editor Joe Walker (“Dune”) had a lot more action to deal with in expanding Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic. It became a high-octane “Lawrence of Arabia” in space: a love story and political adventure in which Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) would-be messiah leads the nomadic Fremen in battle on Arrakis, which leads to a holy war. Indeed, the battles demanded a faster pace, more compression of time, and less exposition. Cutting “Part Two” was almost like riding the sandworm into the heat of battle as a desert guerilla fighter. Walker told IndieWire that it was “bignormous.”

‘Emilia Perez’Courtesy of Netflix

In “Wicked,” Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman, we get the unlikely friendship between Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), a compassionate girl with green skin, and the conceited Galinda (Ariana Grande), who eventually become the Wicked Witch and Glinda the Good. Chu’s go-to editor, Myron Kerstein, got a crash course in VFX-heavy movies to prepare for the workflow. The movie offers musical spectacle that leans into magical realism as well as the intimate drama between the two leads, which primarily takes place at Shiz University before a meeting with The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) in Emerald City.

With “Challengers,” director Luca Guadagnino tackles the competitive nature of tennis as a love triangle involving former tennis prodigy-turned-coach Zendaya, her husband and slumping tennis champ Mike Faist, and low-circuit tennis player Josh O’Connor, who is her ex-lover and his former best friend. Editor Marco Costa juxtaposes the relationships and rivalries in non-linear fashion across 13 years, with the matches reflecting their changing emotional and personal dynamics. The editing is built on geometries and shapes, inspired by the image of the triangle. He created symmetries and complementary movements, imagining the tennis court net as a mirror in which the characters reflect themselves. He also deconstructed time using numerous slow-motion shots, which are broken and fractured by hyperkinetic energy and accelerations and slowdowns, just like the pacing of tennis matches.

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” (A24) follows a group of war journalists (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley) from New York City to Washington, D.C., during a civil war that grips the country. Roberts cuts back and forth between the authentic-looking guerilla combat aesthetic and the still photography taken by Dunst and Spaeny, who get caught up in an “All About Eve” dynamic.

“The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s body horror fairy tale, concerns Demi Moore’s Elisabeth, who is reborn as twenty-something Sue (Margaret Qualley) thanks to a miracle drug, which causes a tug-of-war for possession of the younger body. The editors embrace a maximalist approach to the gory satire, in which the two women are transformed into horrifying creatures.

“Nickel Boys” (Amazon MGM Studios), RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, follows two Black teenagers, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who become friends as wards of a barbaric juvenile reform school in Jim Crow–era Florida. The film is a sensory experience about their different POVs — hope and despair— with lots of abstract imagery. Editor Nicholas Monsour (“Nope”) said it was crucial “that the editing techniques we used met the highest technical and dramatic expectations of a contemporary audience in order to accentuate the more experimental gestures RaMell made to reorient the viewer’s mode of perception.”

‘Wicked’Universal

“September 5” (Paramount), director Tim Fehlbaum’s (“Hell”) docudrama about ABC Sports’ groundbreaking broadcast of the Israeli terrorist attack during the 1972 Munich Olympics, recalls “All the President’s Men” as a suspenseful, journalistic procedural. Go-to editor Hansjörg Weißbrich handles the fast-paced narrative. The editor seamlessly alternates between the ABC archival footage of Jim McKay’s broadcast on the monitors and the dramatic recreation.

“Gladiator II” (Paramount), Ridley Scott’s sequel to his Oscar winner, takes place two decades later as the Roman Empire continues to implode. Cut by go-to editors Claire Simpson and Sam Restivo, the sequel concerns Lucius (Paul Mescal), the former heir to the Empire, forced to enter the Colosseum as a ruthless gladiator. Denzel Washington’s Macrinus uses Lucius as part of his power play against the mad twin emperors, Caracalla (Fred Hechinger) and Geta (Joseph Quinn), by pitting him in the arena against Pedro Pascal’s Roman general, Marcus Acacius. The editors deftly balance the action-packed spectacle in the Colosseum (which includes fighting baboons and naval combat in water and stocked with sharks) with the Lucius revenge story and Macrinus’ political maneuvers.

“The Brutalist” (A24), from director Brady Corbet (“Vox Lux”), is a 215-minute epic shot in VistaVision, spanning 30 years in the life of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jew and Auschwitz survivor who struggles as a visionary architect before being offered a massive project by industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). The Brutalist architectural movement from the ’50s emerged from post-war trauma and serves as the driving force in the conflict between the two. Hungarian editor Dávid Jancsó was not only adept at handling the complex narrative demands but was also familiar with the challenges of shooting in VistaVision (the first time since “One Eyed Jacks”), in which the 35mm film is mounted horizontally for higher resolution.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” (Apple TV+) explores the harrowing German aerial assault on London during World War II as a social realist fable. Editor Peter Sciberras deftly balances the communal and personal stories, in which the use of song permeates the film as a show of strength and coping device. It focuses on biracial youngster George (Elliott Heffernan), who’s hurled on an incredible “Oliver Twist”-like adventure while perilously heading back home to his munitions worker mom (Saoirse Ronan) and musical grandfather (Paul Weller).

“Nosferatu” (Focus Features), director Robert Eggers’ reworking of the legendary silent film, stars Bill Skarsgård as vampire Count Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, and Nicholas Hoult as her husband, Thomas Hutter. Editor Louise Ford (“The Northman”) handles the chills and thrills of roving from 19th-century Germany to a Gothic castle in Romania, where the couple is haunted by dreams that could be harbingers of what’s to come, and peek-a-boo with the elusive vampire, lurking in the shadows.

“Queer,” Guadagnino’s much-anticipated adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novella about disconnected gay American expatriates in post-World War II Mexico City, finds heroin user William Lee (Daniel Craig) falling for the much younger and enigmatic Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). It’s an odyssey in which editor Costa balances great tenderness with psychedelic surrealism.

“The Fire Inside” (Amazon MGM Studios), the directorial debut of cinematographer Rachel Morrison, is a coming-of-age biopic about young boxing phenom Clarissa “T-Rex” Shields (Ryan Destiny) training for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Editor Harry Yoon took great pains to collapse or expand time as needed, with considerations centered around how much of her childhood should be included or if they needed to add another round to the Olympic gold medal watch to increase dramatic tension. The major challenge was cutting a sports movie where the climactic match happens at the end of the second act, so we had to make sure they didn’t lose narrative drive or interest.

“Saturday Night” (Sony Pictures), Jason Reitman’s behind-the-scenes re-enactment of how NBC’s revolutionary late-night sketch comedy show made its live debut on October 11, 1975, provided editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reed with a new kind of experimental freedom. By following anxious producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he guides his cast and crew through rehearsals, they essentially make audiences into a fly on the wall during the make-or-break 90-minute lead-up to showtime. Making it all the more interesting, of course, is that the soon-to-be-legendary “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” consists of Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt).

“A Complete Unknown” (Searchlight Pictures), James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet and edited by Andrew Buckland and Scott Morris, chronicles the folk star’s rise in New York’s West Village in 1961 to the controversial 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he turned electric. By focusing on Dylan’s four-year meteoric rise to stardom, the editorial opportunity allows them to showcase his extraordinary talent, his enigmatic persona, his cultural impact, and his creative suffocation.

Potential nominees are listed in alphabetical order; no film will be deemed a frontrunner until we have seen it.

Contenders

“Blitz”
“The Brutalist”
“Civil War”
“A Complete Unknown”
“The Fire Inside”
“Gladiator II”
“Nickel Boys”
“Nosferatu”
“Queer”
“Saturday Night”
“September 5”
“The Substance”

Cinemato

VFX

BTS: Emilia Pérez

The musical magical realism story of a trans gender drug lord is

Byline Adrian Pennington

A musical melodrama about a cartel boss undergoing gender reassignment surgery has no right to work on paper. Imagine Pedro Almodóvar directing Sicario as Time Out put it. Yet the audacious staging of Emilia Pérez by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s succeeds. The film has already won plaudits at Cannes where, unusually, all four of its female leads were awarded the Best Actress prize while Audiard picked up the Jury prize.

Despite being set in Mexico with a script that is 95% Spanish language, this French production is the country’s nomination for International Feature at the Oscars.

The director, who previously made Rust and Bone and The Prophet, originally wrote the screenplay as an opera libretto in four acts. When French cinematographer Paul Guilhaume AFC, DOP joined the project things had changed.

“It was still going to be an opera but Jacques also had a desire to make a film that was super realistic, shot in Mexico, and without any music. Over time I saw the two projects converge into one.”

Less than a year before the start of principal photography the film was set to be an opera but shot on location in Mexico “with a look very anchored to reality,” says Guilhaume. “During the location scouting in Mexico we realised that this would not work because the story would actually be too connected to reality. Jacques sent us an email saying the whole film is going to be exactly as we planned only it will now all be shot in a studio.”

So that’s what they did, building sets on soundstages outside Paris for scenes set in Mexico, London., Bangkok and Switzerland and shooting for 49 days there with five days of exterior work in Mexico.

Emilia Pérez (played by Mexican actor Karla Sofía Gascón) is the rebirthed character of Mexican drug lord Manitas, introduced as a deeply unsavoury figure who makes frustrated but ambitious criminal lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña) an offer she can’t refuse.

“To me the film is almost like a chimera,” says Guilhaume, “a mix of musical and drama elements.”

It is the fusion of song and dance with a story about identity, loneliness, misogeny and the 60,000 people who have been ‘disappeared’ in Mexico’s drug wars which renders the film almost unclassifiable.

“Visually, it’s very stylised on the one hand, but with much grittier moments on the other. There was a constant ‘to and fro’ between the two concepts. We had no reference to work with, since no film had attempted something like this before. So we made lots of tests, really trying to understand what we are doing.”

The visual language borrows from classic noir films, to more modern films like Uncut Gems but also from pop culture references and music videos. Guilhaume was also inspired by the way the film’s choreographer Damien Jalet had used bright white lights thrown into a dark space to create the imagery in his own shows.

“The important thing for Jacques was that the music should not come after the drama as an illustration of what just happened but that the drama would happen inside the music,” Guilhaume says. “He was very clear that he wanted the audience to still have something to learn as the song is going on.”

“My starting point was the emotional message of each song. Is it an intimate scene or one of anger? What’s the energy we are conveying? Perhaps it’s a confession, or a plea for understanding, or about being a prisoner. Each song had to be treated differently based on how it progressed the story.”

The first scene featuring Rita in a Mexico City street market soon erupts into full song and dance (of the song ‘Alegato’). It was the first scene they shot and it became a test for how they would shoot the rest of the film’s musical numbers.

“We spent three weeks on these first three minutes so that it was both chaotic and extremely accurate. It also helped introduce a specific language for the film where the dance numbers blend in with the characters’ body language, just as the songs blend in with the dialogue.”

After initially imagining the market street to be empty and operatic with a black background heightening the focus on Rita, tests showed that the approach wasn’t focussed enough on the story.

“We reworked it to include many more elements such as market stores and crowds of extras and within that to have Zoe writing her plea for the defence. The first scene creates this dynamic between the film’s different artforms and gave it a sense of urgency and intensity.”

This scene and much of the rest of the film was shot against blue screen with backgrounds replaced by 3D generated sets in post.

A specific example is the shot near the beginning of the film showing Rita waiting in front of a newspaper shop when she gets abducted. The backdrop here including of the courthouse was a 3D replacement. The street market scene was augmented with trees, telephone cables, and more shops.

The film’s climactic gun fight in the desert was shot at night in a quarry with the foreground dressed and backgrounds replaced in post.

Other scenes featured backgrounds of photographic plates shot on location in Mexico. While there a practical reasons for extensive bluescreen (such as giving the filmmakers more control) the result also evokes a dreamlike quality in keeping with the film’s hybrid fantasy and reality.

“The first act of the movie happens entirely at night so we knew we would explore darkness, but it had to stay shiny and bright in some elements of the frame. That could be elements in the set design, like the giant TV screens behind Zoe at the karaoke bar.”

Another constant inspiration for Guilhaume was the Italian photographer Alex Majoli, whose images of realistic scenes are lit with magical contrast and shiny flashes.

“We wanted the film to be a mix of a light musical feeling and dark realism. In a way we wanted to keep the timeless imagery of an opera stage, with the characters standing in dark environments, but including in it modern elements of light, using LED, projections, lasers, and very contemporary light fixtures.”

The film’s electric colour palette had its cues in the costume and production design and also acts to contrast with scenes set in the dark and strong daylight.

“The first act happens at night and I had full reign from Jacques to explore darkness so as long as we saw the actor’s faces. In those dark environments we focused on deep reds, some deep greens and tried during the whole film to avoid pastel colours. In the second act there is more daylight. Everything had to be a bit more joyful as the story unfolds. By the end, the colour palette has blended and become greyer.”

Music video elements

Audiard had met Guilhaume on the set of French detective series The Bureau and invited him to shoot the 2021 feature Paris, 13th District. However, it was Guilhaume’s music promo work for artists including Rosalia, Beabadoobee and Kanye West that also inspired the look of two showstopping numbers in Emilia Perez, one at a fundraising gala and another in the courthouse.

“Jacques wanted the film to be infused by something of the music video world but we had to be careful not to make a big music video.”

Audiard wanted to bring on board Steadicam operator Sacha Naceri who shoots a lot of music videos to help make the camerawork integral to the choreography.

“I’d describe Jacques’ aesthetic is an aesthetic of movement. He applies that to every craft in a film. In the cinematography it's obvious. If the camera is too static, he won't be happy, something in the image has to have motion. If not the camera then maybe it's the light. If it's not the light, maybe it's the performance of the dancers.

“You could extend this to music or editing to the general rhythm of the film and even to the script - you always have something going in motion.”

For all that the scenes were extensively planned (Guilhaume has a notebook containing a hundred pages of detailed ideas) they retained flexibility to improvise in the moment.

“We always tried to have something that we called an ‘eye image,” he says. “It didn’t have to be for the whole mise-en-scène, the whole blocking of the scene. It was just an image that we keep with us in our memory after the sequence. It could be a particular lighting design or could be a car in flames. Sometimes we had a very clear idea of the blocking. Very often we’d throw everything out when the actors arrived on set and gave us something new but we always knew what we were looking for.”

Camera choice

When the film was still envisioned as an opera shot against a black background, Guilhaume planned to shoot anamorphic to accentuate lighting. After tests he chose Blackwing7 lenses from Tribe which are marketed as able to produce images of “musical fidelity…” that can be tuned “identical to how EQ adjustment is used in music production… across the audio frequency spectrum.”

“Jacques loved the simplicity that they convey, but also that it's not too digital and not too sharp,” the DP says “It was a good balance between style and an image that is not overly visible.”

Sony Venice was selected for its light sensitivity, notably the day exteriors of a snowstorm in Lausanne filmed in the studio which had huge ceiling. “Daylighting a studio is extremely expensive because you have to reproduce the whole sky. We knew we needed a camera that would be sensitive.”

Mostly they shot single camera, occasionally with another, which was also a Venice. Colourist Arthur Paux took time to add in textures which Guilhaume felt was missing from rushes shot in a studio on digital video.

Netflix will stream the film in November following a theatrical release.

ends

Joe Walker is a British film editor who has worked in both England and Los Angeles. In 2022, he won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for his work on Dune, having been nominated twice before for 12 Years a Slave and Arrival. For the American Cinema Editors Award for Best Edited Feature Film – Dramatic he has received a string of six nominations and in 2016^[1] he won, for Arrival.^[2] H

The highly-anticipated sequel to the epic Dune: Part One had the challenge of communicating the deeper narrative of the original novels all the while creating a standalone film, reports Adrian Pennington.

Perhaps the standout sequence in Dune: Part Two is Paul Atreides’ triumphant ride of a colossal sandworm. It’s a scene that has been 40 years in the making since director Denis Villeneuve first drew storyboards of it as a teenager and required three months on location and considerable work by editor Joe Walker who compares it and other parts of the sequel to a Bond film.

Director/Writer/Producer Denis Villeneuve and Production Designer Patrice Vermette on the set of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “Dune: Part Two,” a Warner Bros. Pictures releaseSource: Niko Tavernise. Copyright: © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“The very first thing I saw of Dune: Part Two was previz for that scene,” Walker tells IBC365. “It was meticulously worked out and shot by a dedicated unit under the command of producer and second unit director Tanya Lapointe but in the cutting room it was like a jigsaw.”

One shot in the sequence, of Paul (Timothée Chalamet) running along the ridge of a dune and then the centre of the dune collapsing into a sea of sand, appears in storyboards Villeneuve had created with a childhood friend in the early ‘80s. Another shot, at the scene’s start, is a close-up of a thumper pounding the sand which is identical in framing, size and action to his original vision. But previz only gets the filmmaker so far.

“Denis and I came back to the scene repeatedly. We were tough on it. We removed shots that had taken a lot of effort to get because in some way they were indulgent or repetitive.”

He and Villeneuve have collaborated on previous projects including Arrival and Dune: Part One for which Walker won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing.

Bond theme

“Denis described the effect he wanted as being a kid on the back of a school bus, the axle bumping,” Walker says. “There was to be the sense of there being no purchase on the worm. You can’t just lie there because it will throw you off. Then, Denis said, it was like being on a skyscraper – ‘a skyscraper turning’.

“When he used those words Chris (Christos Voutsinas, additional editor) and I dug into our archive of sounds for girders grinding and massive ships moving to match with the huge strength of this worm coursing through the sand.”

The first cut of the sequence was so cacophonous that it dissipated the overall impact. Then they began to deconstruct it. “When everything is noise, the music’s pounding and people are screaming there is no shape,” Walker says. “So, we turned off the music in the first part of the scene. As Paul sees the worm and begins to run towards it, we just play sound FX to build the anticipation and anxiety of this unpredictable unstoppable beast.”

To emphasise the major story point of this scene, we hear Dune’s signature tune. “It’s our Bond theme,” Walker says. “We’ve deliberately starved the film of that particular piece of music until the point that Paul stands up on the worm. There is something religious about that moment.”

The giant worm and rider then bashes through the dune. “We saw an opportunity in the mix to wipe out sound FX and just play the music strong. The whole [Hans] Zimmer effect of organ noises, singing and pounding rhythm.”

Villeneuve himself describes, “a whole structure of sound” that he and Walker work on together with supervising sound editor Richard King and sound mixers Ron Bartlett and Doug Hemphill. “It’s a map that is as important as the images when we finish the director’s cut, to bring the sound of the worm to life.”

Story first

If Dune: Part One was a more meditative film centred on Paul Atreides, in Part Two, the character comes of age, taking control of his own destiny and setting up Dune Messiah, a third film based on Frank Herbert’s 1969 sequel.

“Denis always thought of Part One as an appetiser,” Walker says. “If we’re making a film set in Brooklyn in 2024 then we don’t need to explain how a car Like why are they still fighting with swords, not guns? Then you have to explain shield technology, and Spice and set up all the different factions - the Mentat, the Bene Gesserit, the Harkonnen, the House Atreides.”

He adds, “In Part One the story hasn’t gone far enough to show the turn in events. There’s big scope for Paul to go from reluctant, dreaming teenager to a superpower and to cover all the compromises and sacrifices on the way.”

Having set the various elements in motion,

. “Continuing the long tradition of epic action-adventure films like James Bond we start with a pre-credit dialogue-light action sequence, before we dig into the story. For us, there is an obvious delight in the beginning of seeing the grotesque image of this insect-like culture [Harkonnen] totally out of place in the desert and surviving on tanks of gas.”

The spine of the story in Part Two is the Freman, a desert people who survive only with complete respect for their environment. This community was important to Herbert, an ecologist and biologist, and Dune’s filmmakers spent a great deal of screen time explaining their rituals and culture.

“In Part One there was limited screen time - just two scenes - with Stilgar (Javier Bardem) to embed the idea of the Fremen. We also did our level best to explain the sand walk and to see Paul’s attempt to learn the language. But in Part Two it was fundamental to all of us to dive deep into the Fremen.

He continues, “The truth about Paul is that he would happily stay as a Fedaykin [Fremen warrior] were it not for the machinations of Stilgar and Jessica [Rebecca Fergusson) making up the gospel as they go along. Without them, and the ancient code of the ‘Kanly’ (feudal duels), Paul would have been proud to stay an equal to Chani (Zendaya). It is necessary to feel Paul’s honesty and for his relationship with Chani to breathe in order to feel the full weight of events later in the story.”

Scenes depict Paul and Chani on the dunes shot at magic hour in Jordan’s Wadi Rum. “First of all, she is no shoe-in. She is not a prize. She’s an equal and he wants to be equal to her. Only with caution does she give him credence when he proves himself as a warrior.”

Walker describes Villeneuve and Cinematographer Grieg Fraser as “like snipers” in that “they don’t scatter their coverage”. Intimate scenes of the main character’s love story and enchanting sand walk tended to have precise footage. In contrast, the film’s climactic battle was shot with multiple angles and culled in the edit from 15 hours of material.

“We can go from a shot of a tiny, vulnerable desert mouse to the gigantism of a state-of-the-art Spice harvester pounding the ground to suck out the resources of an impoverished world by a fascistic state.”

Kuleshov effect

Dune Part 2 has to convey the complex religious fervour of a cult being born as well as Paul’s hallucinatory visions as his Spice-infused mind gains the power to see into the past and future. Both ideas were developed in the edit.

Austin Butler as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures’ action adventure “Dune: Part Two,” a Warner Bros. Pictures releaseSource: Copyright: © 2023 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.

“Whilst the idea was scripted, we had to provide a sound and visual identity to the idea of Paul’s fear and his anxiety,” Walker says. “Denis had shot ‘dream’ material following a woman into the desert surrounded by starving people but we found we had to be very selective in what we showed.

“One of the things I learned on Arrival (a story designed in a time loop to question the nature of fate) was to use the Kuleshov effect. Meaning, if you cut from somebody thinking about something to something, it looks like they are thinking about what you are showing. It’s a simple and powerful concept.”

With that in mind, Walker selected shots more personal to Paul – the vision of Chani with a burned face, for example. “It’s such a harrowing image and reflects his sense of what the cost is going to be.”

The biggest storytelling development in the cut was the concept of the south of Arrakis, the planet also known as Dune. “It’s a physical place where Jessica journeys to but it’s also about faith. It’s about the Bene Gesserit, the Harkonnen and a cautionary tale of consequences.

“We flash to Paul’s anxieties and he articulates his fears in words. We also have diary entries from Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) which talk of the south and specifically that ‘nobody can live there without faith.’ We have aerial shots filmed by Dylan Goss of a volcanic landscape. Going south means Muad’Dib is going to trigger a holy war.”

Walker says the overall challenge was to marry the “fractal narrative” of Herbert’s books (where for example, he provides multiple names for Paul “like the number of names for God in the bible”) with a “hyper narrative” to maintain the story arc.

“What was pleasing was that after the 19th fine cut, we found something that maintains a level of anxiety that drives you forward. In the edit we are moving pieces around, finessing and eliminating anything in the path of that story. We’re trying to economise without lopping off an arm and a leg to complete the path.

“As someone once said, we are not just about just bums on seats. We want eyes on stalks.”

Shooting infrared Harkonnen

The film opens in the middle of an eclipse, a phenomena not seen in Part One and affording cinematographer Grieg Fraser the chance to expand the film’s colour palette.

“We used an infrared filter, which actually takes away visible light from the camera and takes away a lot of the visible tones that the camera sees, so it doesn’t feel quite of this world,” he says.

He shot with IMAX compatible Alexa 65 and Alexa LF Mini saying that the power of the format for sequences in Part One, “and what happens to the audience when they sit in a cinema on a scale like that made Denis and I keen to shoot the entire film for IMAX in an IMAX ratio.”

At Villeneuve’s suggestion, Fraser also shot daylight scenes on the Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime in complete contrast to the saturated sun of Arrakis. Sets for Giedi Prime were built on a converted exhibition hall called Hungexpo in Budapest which at 103,000ft² and 45ft-high had the requisite scale.

“One thing we discussed was this idea of anti-light,” Fraser says. “Not a black hole of light, but something where light doesn’t exist the way we know it. So, we used a technique that I’ve used for VFX, which is using infrared on the sensor of the Alexa LF. Effectively, we put a visible light cut filter in front of the lens, which means the camera can’t see any visible light, and we take out the infrared cut filter from the camera, so all the camera sees is infrared. This became the exterior light for Giedi Prime.”

Sandworm dissection

The sandworm riding sequence involved rebuilding part of the top of the sand dune in another location, where VFX and stunt teams could have control and use cranes. This included fitting three tubes inside the dune, which would be pulled by industrial tractors.

As VFX Supervisor Paul Lambert explains: “We’d have Timothée’s stunt double [Lorenz Hideyoshi] attached to a safety wire and he would run. The tubes would pull out. The sand would collapse, and Lorenz would fall down the top of the dune into the swirling dust below, kicking up sand. We had to get the timing right, the camera had to follow, and so on. It took some practice runs over a few days because the reset was quite long. Then my team [at DNEG] extended it out in CG using plates and aerial photography, making you feel like Paul is a lot higher up, and then of course adding the CG worm.

“For the actual ride, we have him on a gimble, so we can change the angle of the platform, surrounded by a huge sand-coloured enclosure that would get lit by the sun and bounce strong sand-coloured light onto Paul. We shot aerial photography that would be the surrounding landscape, while always blasting a lot of sand onto Paul. All combined, it feels like Paul is riding on a worm in the desert.”

Adrian Pennington - The Write Stuff

Friday, 24 January 2025

Oscars preview: Deep dive on nominations in Cinematography, Editing and VFX

No comments:

Post a Comment