More than Just Blue

Cinematography Feature at Creative COW

COW: What was the relationship between the live action footage that you got from the set, and the digital files that you were getting from WETA?

Mark: Oh God! [Laughs] Now, the live action was handled very differently than the rest of the material, including a different compositing process. And all of the visual effects work wasn't being done at WETA - there were other houses working on various pieces and parts of scenes in the movie.

But the live action footage went through some proprietary steps that not everything else had to go through -- some of which I can't really go into, the secret sauce. [Laughs] And that live action stuff was of course some of the earliest stuff we started to work on, and used for setting up "proof of concept" materials.



Chopper Pilot Trudy Chacon (Michelle Rodriguez) helps the Na'vi in their epic battle against the forces determined to destroy Pandora. Photo Credit: ILM. ™ and ©2009 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights Reserved.


Along with the live footage came the plates. We would make sure that everything had an overall sort of pre-look to it before it went to a compositing facility. Those then would be composited in various versions of completeness, and come back to us for color correction and 3D optimizing. They would then sometimes have to be re-comped for whatever reason, such as plates getting updated as things went along.

Like I said, there are two steps in there that I can't really discuss, that are part of the magic that happened on the set.


COW: The system that you designed allowed you to blur the line between production and post. The two were really going on at the same time, weren't they?

Mark: We were getting visual effect shots up until the very end, so there was nothing traditional about it. A normal movie would come to the DI process, and you would say, "Reel 1 is locked, here it is." Nothing was locked until, literally, it was going to camera, or going on to digital cinema manufacturing.

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