In her directorial film debut, Past Lives, South Korean-born playwright Celine Song has made a romantic and deceptively simple film that is intensely personal and autobiographical yet universal, with its themes of love, loss and what might have been. Past Lives is broken into three parts spanning countries and decades. First we see Nora as a young girl in South Korea, developing an early bond with her best friend, Hae Sung, before moving with her family to Toronto. Then we see Nora in her early 20s as she reconnects virtually with Hae Sung. Finally, more than a decade later, Hae Sung visits Nora, now a married playwright living in New York. I spoke with Song about the post workflow and making the A24 film, which is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

• VFX Supervisor Sam O’Hare on Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money
• Take postPerspective’s First Annual Readership Survey!
• Zach Robinson on Scoring Netflix’s 

Lavish and visually stunning, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things tells the fantastical story of Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter. The film just won five BAFTAs and scored 11 Oscar nominations, including nods for cinematographer Robbie Ryan, BSC, ISC, and editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, ACE, who were both previously nominated for their work on Lanthimos’ The Favourite. We recently spoke with Ryan and Mavropsaridis (aka “Blackfish”) about making the film and collaborating with Lanthimos, who also got an Oscar nomination.

• Sundance: DP Pierce Derks on In a Violent Nature
• How Egress Fees are Holding Back Media & Entertainment
• Behind the Title: London Alley Editor Luis Caraza Peimbert

Martin Scorsese and DP Rodrigo Prieto first teamed up on The Wolf of Wall Street and followed that with Silence and The Irishman. Now they’ve collaborated on Killers of the Flower Moon, an epic Western and crime drama that tells the tragic true story of the infamous Osage murders of the 1920s. When the Osage Native Americans strike oil on their reservation in Oklahoma, a cattle baron plots to murder tribal members and steal their wealth, even while he persuades his nephew to marry an Osage woman. I spoke with Prieto about shooting the film — which earned 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography — and how he collaborated with Scorsese on the look.

• Review: Dell Precision 5480 Mobile Workstation
• DP and Colorist Talk Look of The Serial Killer’s Wife
• Post and VFX Houses Team Up for CrowdStrike Super Bowl Spot

Nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Lead Actor, American Fiction is writer Cord Jefferson’s impressive directorial debut. It’s a dramedy satire that stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk, an erudite and frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from stereotypical “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, which, to his disdain, becomes a huge critical and commercial success. Jefferson himself earned a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for American Fiction for his adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure.” I spoke to him about making the film and navigating post. Editor Hilda Rasula (French Exit) joined the conversation.

• Using Cinematography to Ground Percy Jackson in Reality
• Review: Logickeyboard Pro Version

Swedish cinematographer Linus Sangren, ASC, has multiple award noms and wins under his belt, including an Oscar for his work on the retro-glamorous musical La La Land. His new film, Saltburn, couldn’t be more different. Written and directed by Emerald Fennell, Saltburn is a dark, psychosexual thriller about desire, obsession and murder. It follows Oxford University student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), who finds himself drawn into the world of the charming and aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), who invites him to Saltburn, his family’s sprawling estate, for a summer never to be forgotten. We spoke with Sandgren, whose credits include First Man, Babylon and American Hustle, about making the film and his workflow.

• The Other Black Girl Composer on Show and Style
• Editors’ Roundtable — The State of Documentaries
• Behind the Title: PS260 Editor Georgia Dodson

Directed by Sam Esmail, Leave the World Behind follows the Sandford family on their impromptu vacation to a beautiful rental home on idyllic Long Island. The trip soon goes awry when a cyberattack leaves them without access to their regularly used tech devices, and two strangers arrive at their door claiming it’s their home. As the world begins to unravel around them, the two families must put their distrust of each other aside and ultimately rely on each other for survival. We sat down with supervising sound editor Kevin Buchholz and re-recording mixers John W. Cook II and Beau Borders, to learn about the collaborative effort with director Esmail to build sound as a main character itself.

• DP and Colorist on Lighting Up Candy Cane Lane
• Editor Yvette M. Amirian Talks Workflow on Holiday Film EXmas
• Loki DP Isaac Bauman Goes Old-School for S2

postPerspective started its Meet the Artist Podcast series in 2023. The premiere episode featured  a conversation with the audio team behind Showtime’s Your Honor. Since then we’ve spoken to editors, colorists, directors, visual effects artists and more. Visit this link to see our entire body of episodes. And join us for some more great coverage in 2024…

• Star Trek: Picard VFX Team
• Director Eva Longoria on Flamin’ Hot
• Audio Post for Showtime’s Your Honor
• Wednesday‘s Picture Editor Jay Prychidny
• Company 3 Colorist Jill Bogdanowicz

To be Barbie in Barbie Land is to be a perfect being in a perfect place. Unless you have a full-on existential crisis and suddenly develop flat feet and bad breath and end up traveling to the real world to find some answers. That’s the clever setup for the biggest blockbuster of the summer – and now the biggest movie on the awards circuit thanks to its nine Golden Globe noms. Helmed by Oscar-nominated writer/director Greta Gerwig (Little Women, Lady Bird)) and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, Barbie is a joyful celebration of girl power that showcases truly awesome visual effects overseen by production VFX supervisor Glen Pratt at Framestore. I spoke with Pratt, whose credits include Paddington 2 and Beauty and the Beast, about the challenges and workflow.

• Top 5: My Holiday Gift Guide for Media Creators
• Priscilla’s DP and Colorist on Film’s Look and Feel
• Behind the Title: Outpost VFX Supervisor Robin Lamontagne

You could say Formosa’s supervising sound editor/sound designer/re-recording mixer Mark Mangini is pretty much a Renaissance man of audio. Dune, Mad Max: Fury Road, Blade Runner 2049 and over 125 more films. Six Oscar nominations and two wins. Educator. Musician. His latest feature is the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which stars Seth Rogen, John Cena, Jackie Chan and many others. In this version of the Turtles tale, the brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers. We spoke to Mangini about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT), his process on the film and his philosophy about the work.

• Setting the Color for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon
• Colorist Chat: Mumbai-Based After Studios’ Edgar Reyna
• DP Powell Robinson on Shooting Hulu’s Horror Film Appendage

Writer/director Todd Haynes, who was Oscar-nominated for his ’50s romantic drama Far from Heaven, has always been drawn to classic melodrama and period pieces that examine provocative issues. His new film, May December, tells the story of a shocking affair between 36-year-old Gracie (Julianne Moore) and 13-year-old Joe (Charles Melton). But it’s the fallout from the salacious tabloid-ready romance that Haynes is most interested in. Some 20 years later, Gracie and Joe now lead a seemingly picture-perfect suburban life. But their domestic bliss is disrupted when a famous actress (Natalie Portman) arrives to research her upcoming film role as Gracie.

• Colorist Chat: Outpost’s Clark Griffiths
• Sound Lounge: Two Mixers, a Sound Designer and 25 Years
• 2023 Colour Award Winners Announced at Camerimage

NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers came on the air almost 10 years ago, and there from the start was Dan Dome, who is the show’s associate director and lead editor. After heading out to LA to work on The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien and Conan on TBS, this native New Yorker found his way back to New York and the world of editing comedy, as he helped launch Late Night. We recently spoke to him for the latest episode of our Meet the Artist podcast. Dome took what he learned while working on Conan and adapted that workflow for Late Night. “I was pretty confident that I knew best practices for workflows and had to set up a file system within our SAN environment. Most of the entertainment shows are either Premiere- or Avid-based, and we went with Premiere.”

• Colorist Eric Weidt Talks David Fincher’s The Killer
• Post Production Rates Survey: Katie Hinsen on 2023 Edition
• Behind the Title: Rasha Clark, Ataboy’s Head of Production

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Sound plugins are incredible, particularly for audio restoration and especially for AI-powered audio restoration, noise reduction and voice creation. They allow engineers and even day-to-day prosumers to do things that that were either extremely difficult or impossible to do even just a year ago — such as reduce reverb, interpolate and add frequencies that are missing from the recording and dynamically reduce anything that isn’t a voice. And they are fast. Audio recordings that had been completely unusable are suddenly back in play. If there’s a signal, then there’s now a pretty good chance it can be cajoled into something usable. It’s often as simple as turning a single dial. These voice-filtering and noise-reducing technologies have been developed and popularized rapidly due to the rise of the smartphone, generative AI in the media, the increase in video conferencing and do-it-at-home solutions, advances… Continue Reading

A virtual art department, known as VAD, comprises a team of artists and engineers who work their magic (and use game engine technology) to create environments, characters, props and beyond for a virtual production. We sat down with Meptik’s Joshua Eason, Andrew Amato and Katie Pietzka to learn about the various roles within their VAD, as well as the asset catalogue they are developing to help smaller-budget projects use this technology. Meptik excels in live and experiential events powered by virtual production, in addition to film and television.

• Camp Lucky Explores The Volume’s Human Factor
• VP Workflows: S4 Studios and Original Syndicate
• Roundtable: The World of Virtual Production
• The DPs’ Perspective: Shooting Virtual Productions

The Last of Us, HBO’s series based on the videogame of the same name, is full of zombies created by a parasitic fungus. And like the game, it’s an intimate character study that tells the story of Joel (Pedro Pascal), a smuggler, who has to protect and escort Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenage girl with a rare immunity to the plague, across a US ravaged by the zombie apocalypse. The nine-part series was created by Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann (he created and wrote the 2013 game) and co-showrunner Craig Mazin (the writer behind HBO’s Chernobyl). The Last of Us racked up multiple Emmy nods, including nominations for editors Timothy Good, ACE, and Emily Mendez.

• Editing: Geofrey Hildrew on Setting the Tone for Netflix’s Painkiller
• Review: Xencelabs Pen Display 24
• Audio Post Studio Mr. Bronx Makes Move in New York City

We were excited to be back in Amsterdam for IBC 2023! postPerspective TV shot videos around the show floor, all in an effort to deliver IBC to those who couldn’t make the trip and to those who were at the conference but unable to see everything. We hope you enjoy our extensive coverage of new technology, upcoming products and industry trends. It will be time well spent. This is the first of two video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos now, please click here to see our full archive.

• • Molinare’s Darren Woolfson
  • Vaudeville Sound’s Luke Hatfield
  • Blackmagic’s Bob Caniglia

Directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer tells the story of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and follows the work of his team of scientists during the Manhattan Project, leading to the development of the atomic bomb. Cillian Murphy plays the infamous figure. The film features visual effects depicting everything from the first atomic test in the New Mexico desert to physical phenomena ranging from subatomic particles to exploding stars and black holes. As the film’s sole VFX partner, Dneg delivered over 100 shots, crafted from more than 400 practically shot elements, to help create some of the film’s most important and explosive sequences. Oscar-winning production VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson and Dneg VFX supervisor Giacomo Mineo led the team. Here they talk about creating the visual effects and how they did it.

• DP Judd Overton Talks Season 2 of Killing It
• Behind the Title: Bruton Stroube Editor Jazzy Kettenacker

The Netflix limited series Beef tells the story of two Los Angeles residents from opposite ends of the economic and social spectrum. Danny (Steven Yeun) is a struggling contractor living in gritty Koreatown and Amy (Ali Wong) is a successful lifestyle guru living in the wealthy suburb of Calabasas. Their lives become inextricably linked after a road-rage incident in a parking lot that quickly escalates into a full-blown feud. The series earned 13 Emmy nominations across multiple categories, including one for executive producer/director Jake Schreier. We spoke with Schreier about directing the show, his collaboration with show creator “Sonny” Lee Sung Jin, and his involvement in post.

• Emmys: Editing FX’s Welcome to Wrexham
• Emmys: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Sound Editor
• Emmys: Editing HBO’s A Black Lady Sketch Show

Paris Barclay is one of television’s most successful and honored directors. A two-time Emmy Award winner, he’s directed nearly 200 episodes of television, including such series as The West Wing, ER, Glee, CSI, The Shield, Scandal and NYPD Blue. He received his ninth Emmy nomination for an episode of the Netflix show Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. The 10-part true crime series, created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, dramatizes the life and death of notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (Evan Peters). It received six Emmy noms. Barclay’s nod was for Ep. 6, “Silenced.” We recently spoke with Barclay about making the harrowing show, the challenges, his love of post and the importance of sound.

• Emmys: Re-Recording Mixers on Daisy Jones & The Six
• Emmys: Editing Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
• Emmys: Wednesday‘s Visual Effects Supervisor and Producer

Directed by James Mangold, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the long-awaited final chapter in the beloved saga, which stars Harrison Ford reprising his role as the whip-smart archaeologist one last time. Featuring huge set pieces and spectacular VFX – including the opening train scene, the tuktuk chase sequence, the horseback chase through the ticker tape parade, an underwater dive in Greece and the grand finale — the globe-trotting adventure was filmed on location in Morocco, Sicily, Scotland and England in addition to stages at Pinewood Studios. I spoke with the film’s overall VFX supervisor, Oscar winner Andrew Whitehurst, and ILM VFX super Robert Weaver about the challenges of creating the VFX and working with Mangold (Ford v Ferrari, Walk the Line).

• Emmys: The Umbrella Academy VFX Supervisor Everett Burrell
• Meet the Artist Podcast: DigitalFilm Tree’s Ramy Katrib
• Bringing Bears to Life in Coors Keep It Fresh Campaign

Thanks to such hits as Knives Out and its sequel, Glass Onion, director/writer Rian Johnson has almost single-handedly revived the murder mystery genre. His latest project is Poker Face, a 10-episode series following Natasha Lyonne’s character, Charlie, who can always tell when someone is lying. After leaving her job in Las Vegas, with bad guys hot on her heels, she hits the road in her Plymouth Barracuda and encounters a new cast of characters and strange crimes she can’t help but solve at every stop. To help set the tone for his new show, Johnson turned to his longtime editor, Bob Ducsay, ACE. I spoke with him about the editing and post workflows on the series, which streams on Peacock. Poker Face was recently nominated for four Emmy Awards, including production design and lead actress for Lyonne.

• DP Chat: David Duchovny’s Bucky F*cking Dent
• The Importance of Achieving Realism in Visual Effects
• Behind the Title: Final Cut Editor/Partner JD

When the first Mission: Impossible film starring Tom Cruise came out in 1996, it began a tradition of bringing on a new A-list director for each movie — Brian De Palma was followed by John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird. This changed after Chris McQuarrie directed 2015’s Rogue Nation. The Oscar winner has been at the MI helm ever since, cementing his and Cruise’s long-standing creative collaboration, which includes Top Gun: Maverick, Edge of Tomorrow, Valkyrie and Jack Reacher. The pair are back at it with Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, in which Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his IMF team embark on their most dangerous mission yet: to track down a terrifying new weapon that threatens all of humanity before it falls into the wrong hands.

• Boom Box’s Kate Finan Talks Audio Post on Gabby’s Dollhouse
• Review: Five Cool Tools for the Summer
• Behind the Title: Boomshot Editor Tommy Button

Paramount+’s Star Trek: Picard has aired its third and final season, giving those of us who loved the original Star Trek: The Next Generation some closure. It was filled with original cast members, Easter eggs and some pretty serious dysfunctional family drama. Oh, and the “Did Dr. Beverly Crusher and Capt. Jean-Luc Picard hook up?” question has finally been answered. They certainly did. For this episode of our Meet the Artist podcast, postPerspective’s editor-in-chief, Randi Altman, spoke with Picard‘s supervising producer/VFX supervisor Jason Zimmerman, who oversees the visual effects on all the Star Trek shows, and associate VFX supervisor Brian Tatosky, who oversaw the series day to day. Picard featured between 150 and 200 visual effects shots per episode, and the team was tasked with making sure the iconic Star Trek effects stayed iconic while also modernizing them for today’s audiences.… Continue Reading

Peacock’s Mrs. Davis, created by Damon Lindelof (Lost) and Tara Hernandez (Big Bang Theory), is no ordinary episodic. Both mind-bending and comedic, it tackles AI, faith and religion. At the helm is director Owen Harris, who won an Emmy for his work on the sci-fi series Black Mirror. The series centers around Mrs. Davis, the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence, and Sister Simone, a nun who is devoted to destroying her. Sister Simone partners with her ex-boyfriend Wiley, leader of the anti-AI resistance, to go on a globe-spanning journey full of flashbacks and wacky side plots to take down Mrs. Davis. I spoke with Harris, who also executive produced Mrs. Davis, about the challenges of making the ambitious series.

• Review: Lenovo’s P360 Ultra Small-Footprint Workstation
• Editor Craig Scorgie on Cannes Film In Flames
• Behind the Title: Producer Debashis Mazumder

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Marvel Studios’ Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the final film in director/writer James Gunn’s trilogy about a beloved band of planet-hopping misfits, features action, comedy and chaotic weirdness. To bring it all to life, Gunn and his franchise VFX supervisor, Stephane Ceretti, oversaw over 3,000 visual effects shots created by a raft of companies. Heading up the Weta team was VFX supervisor Guy Williams, who previously collaborated with Gunn on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, for which Williams was Oscar-nominated. Williams’ credits include Avatar, Iron Man 3 and The Avengers. I spoke with Williams about Weta’s almost 700 VFX shots and the challenges involved.

• The Look: Anatomy of an Indie Film Color Palette
• Scoring Kids vs. Aliens and Vice TV Wrestling Docuseries
• Colorist Chat: Alana Cotton From Images & Sound

Director Louis Leterrier has been behind the wheel of some monster productions (Clash of the Titans, The Incredible Hulk), so he was well- prepared to take over the reins of Fast X, the 10th film in the Fast & Furious franchise, from longtime director Justin Lin. Even so, he says that “these films are on such a massive scale, with so many moving parts and huge visual effects, that nothing can really prepare you for it. Each time, they’re even bigger and even more complex than the last one.” The latest installment reunites Vin Diesel and other Fast regulars for another testosterone-fueled adventure. Co-written by Lin, the film takes us to a variety of locales, including LA , London, Rome, Portugal, Rio and Antarctica. I spoke with Leterrier about making the film and working with post and VFX.

• Remembering Bryce Button: February 4, 1966 – May 19, 2023
• Editing a Classic Whodunit: Invitation to a Murder
• Behind the Title: Andy Elliott,Dock10 Virtual

AMC’s dramedy Lucky Hank follows Hank Devereaux (Bob Odenkirk), an English department chair at a small Pennsylvania college. Hank, who always seems on the edge of a meltdown, wrote one novel years ago and has had writer’s block since, contributing to his foul mood. The show follows Hank as he navigates his family and wacky colleagues, while also trying to come to terms with his successful writer father, who abandoned him as a child. Lucky Hank was created by Paul Lieberstein (The Office) and Aaron Zelman (The Killing), who called on editors Richard Schwadel (Eps. 1, 2 and 7), Justin Li (Eps. 5 and 6) and Jamie Alain (Eps. 3, 4 and 8) to cut the show. We reached out to Schwadel to talk about tone, pace and more…

• Review: Apple’s MacBook Pro M2 Max
• VFX and Post for Netflix’s Documentary Our Universe
• Composing Sounds of Norway for Horror Film Leave

Allen Hughes, the director of The Defiant Ones docuseries about music legends Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, has done another deep dive into the life and times of a hip-hop legend – Tupac Shakur. Dear Mama, titled after the artist’s hit song of the same name, the new FX five-part series streaming on Hulu explores the troubled relationship between Tupac and his late mother, former Black Panther member and social activist Afeni Shakur. I spoke with Hughes, whose credits include Menace II Society, Dead Presidents and The Book of Eli, about making the film and his thoughts on post. We also had Lasse Järvi, executive producer, writer and editor on the project, join the conversation.

• Sandra Torres Granovsky Talks Editing Indie Comedy Scrambled
• Review: Huion’s Latest Inspiroy Giano Pen Tablet
• Behind the Title: The Artery Executive Producer Nick Haynes

It was wonderful to be in person again this year for NAB 2023! postPerspective TV shot interviews at our booth and around the show floor, all in an effort to deliver NAB to those who couldn’t make the trip to Vegas this year and to those who were at the show but couldn’t see it all. We hope you enjoy our extensive coverage of new technology, upcoming products and industry trends. It will be time well spent. This is the first of three video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos now, please click here to see our full archive!

• Amazon Studios’ Ken Nakada
• Post Producer David Jeffery
• Blackmagic Design’s Bob Caniglia

Perry Mason, HBO’s origin story of television’s famous legal eagle from the ’50s and ’60s, is back for Season 2 with a twisty new murder case for the lawyer to solve. This time the scion of a powerful oil family is murdered, and Mason and team find themselves at the center of a case that will uncover far-reaching conspiracies. This season of the noir series has new showrunners, Michael Begler and Jack Amiel, creators of The Knick. They take over from the show’s creators, Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald. Perry Mason‘s creative team also expanded with additional fresh eyes, including Chilean director/writer Marialy Rivas, whose credits include Young & Wild, winner of the World Cinema Screenwriting Award at Sundance. I recently spoke with Rivas about directing Perry Mason‘s Episode 5 and Episode 8, the challenges, and her thoughts on post production.

• Nick Trenum: People’s Television

postPerspective, which is currently celebrating its 10th year covering the industry, is proud to announce the launch of our new podcast. Found wherever you get your podcast content — Apple, Spotify, iHeart and more — our Meet the Artist podcast series features creatives not only talking about their recent work, but also sharing their personal journey on making it in the industry. Our premier episode features our own Randi Altman talking with re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor Jon Greasley and re-recording mixer/sound designer Dan Gamache of King Soundworks, the audio post team behind Season 2 of Showtime’s Your Honor, which stars Bryan Cranston as a disgraced New Orleans judge. You’ll hear them go into detail about heightening sounds and painting a picture of desperation and intrigue with sound, while also talking about their workflow.… Continue Reading

Since the first John Wick introduced Keanu Reeves as a lethal but tortured assassin back in 2014, Reeves and director Chad Stahelski have built a franchise that showcases kinetic action scenes and beautifully choreographed fight sequences. Their latest outing together, John Wick: Chapter 4, is even more awesome as Wick once again takes on the worldwide crime syndicate The High Table in an ultra-violent revenge tale full of spectacular stunts, exotic locations and a range of weaponry. To pull this all together, Stahelski enlisted director of photography Dan Laustsen, ASC, DFF, editor Nathan Orloff, and VFX supervisors Jonathan Rothbart and Janelle Croshaw. I spoke with Stahelski, an ex-stuntman who doubled for Reeves in The Matrix, about making this latest iteration, the visual effects and editorial workflows, and the importance of color.

• Composer Mark Hadley Breaks Down the Sounds of Linoleum
• GTC 2023 – New GPUs and AI Acceleration

Even the snobbiest of film snobs has had a hard time shooting down Top Gun: Maverick, one of the biggest success stories in recent movie history. Nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects, Top Gun: Maverick has been credited with helping to bring audiences back to theaters after the pandemic. The original Top Gun (1986) established a mood and aesthetic, and it set a bar. Maverick director Joseph Kosinski understood exactly what Tony Scott’s vision was on the original, and the way forward was clear — lots of action, big sound and heart. Speaking of sound, we recently spoke with Skywalker Sound’s sound supervisor, Al Nelson, part of the Oscar-nominated sound team that also includes Mark Weingarten, James H. Mather, Chris Burdon and Mark Taylor.

• A Post Pro’s Journey: The Move from Jamaica to NYC
• Everything Everywhere All at Once Assistant Editors Talk Workflow
• Behind the Title:

Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s epic feature, follows Elvis Presley as a poor child in Tupelo, Mississippi, through to the last weeks of his life. The film has earned eight Oscar nominations including for Best Picture, Actor, Cinematography, Editing and Sound. There is a lot of ground to cover and a lot of sounds needed to tell Presley’s story in all of those different time frames. And that was just one of the challenges for the film’s Oscar-nominated sound team, made up of Wayne Pashley, MPSE, David Lee, Andy Nelson and Michael Keller. Pashley, who is the owner/co-founder of Sydney’s Big Bang Sound Design, worked with Luhrmann on creating a “symphony of sound,” which was intended to immerse the audience into the life and music of Presley. We spoke to Pashley to discuss his frequent collaborations with Luhrmann, his workflow and the sound of Elvis.

• Colorist Tashi Trieu on Grading Avatar: The Way of Water
• Sundance:

Odds are you have either watched or heard the buzz surrounding the Netflix series Wednesday. The show was shepherded by showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, with the first four episodes directed by filmmaker Tim Burton. In an already iconic performance, Jenna Ortega portrays Wednesday Addams as she tries to solve a murder mystery at her boarding school, the Nevermore Academy. Joining Ortega is a cast that includes Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán and Gwendoline Christie. Working directly with Burton on the four episodes he helmed was editor Jay Prychidny, CCE, whose credits include Orphan Black, the TV version of Snowpiercer and the much-anticipated Scream VI, which is releasing in March. We recently caught up with Prychidny.

• Sundance Doc: DP on Shooting Shirampari: Legacies of the River
• Sundance: Patrick Lawrence on Editing Mirror Party Short
• Sundance Doc: DP Derek Howard Talks Shooting Plan C

A Man Called Otto tells the story of Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks), a grumpy loner who no longer sees the purpose in his life following the tragic loss of his wife. Otto is ready to end it all, but his plans are interrupted when a lively young family moves in next door. Based on the New York Times bestseller “A Man Called Ove,” the film was directed by versatile helmer Marc Forster, whose credits include World War Z, Quantum of Solace, Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland and The Kite Runner. I spoke with Forster about making the film, working with the VFX, and how he handled Hanks’ demanding cat co-star.

• The Sound of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
• VFX: Creating Indie Film Smile’s Creepy Effects
• Review: Halo Vision Plugin From Nugen

In 2009, James Cameron’s Avatar became the highest grossing film of all time. Now with the first sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, he has returned to Pandora and the saga of the Sully family — Jake (Sam Worthington), his mind now permanently embedded in his blue, alien Na’vi body; his wife, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña); and their four children. To create the alien world of The Way of Water, Cameron reteamed with another visionary – Weta’s VFX supervisor Joe Letteri, whose work on Avatar won him an Oscar. (He’s also won for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and King Kong). I spoke with Letteri, who did a deep dive — pun intended — into how the team created all the immersive underwater sequences and cutting-edge VFX.

• Colorist Chat: Ian Vertovec on Creating Natural Look of Devotion
• Behind the Title: Jungle Studios Sound Designer Chris Southwell
• Review: Dear Reality’s Exoverb Reverb Plugin

… Continue Reading

As the year comes to a close, we picked a few of our most popular articles from 2022. We hope you enjoy revisiting them.

• The Evolution of ICVFX: ILM Stagecraft and Dimension
• Apple TV’s WeCrashed: Showrunners and Post Supervisor Talk Workflow
• Color Grading Questlove’s Oscar-Winning Summer of Soul
• Marvel and Netflix: How Studio Operations Manage Media
• Video: The Editors of The Bear Joanna Naugle, Adam Epstein
• Ukrainian Foley Studios Are Open for Business
• Director Jennifer Phang Talks The Flight Attendant
• Meet the Artist: Video Chat With Harbor Colorist Andrea Chlebak

RRR is an Indian superhero movie and an international hit, thanks to its story, visual effects, and blend of emotion and action. The film (whose title stands for Rise, Roar, Revolt) tells the “true” story of two guerrilla fighters who took on the British Raj in the 1920s. It features a literal cast of thousands and a huge army of post and VFX teams behind the scenes. RRR was directed and co-written by S.S. Rajamouli and shot by his longtime cinematographer, KK Senthil Kumar. The collaboration between the director and cinematographer goes back two decades. I spoke with both of them about making this ambitious feature film, which is getting its fair share of Oscar buzz, the challenges of the shoot, and the project’s workflow.

• Company 3: Color Grading the David Bowie Documentary
• Behind the Title: Camp Lucky VFX Supervisor Seth Olson
• A Look at SMPTE’s 2022 Media Technology Summit

Aussie cinematographer Mandy Walker, ACS, ASC, who collaborated with Baz Luhrmann on his sprawling epic Australia, teamed up with the director once more on Elvis. An epic in its own right, Elvis conjures up the life and times — and rise and fall — of this rock ‘n’ roll icon. Starring Austin Butler as the poor white kid from Tupelo, the film is told from the point of view of Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). And as Oscar season ramps up, it’s been getting a lot of buzz. I spoke to Walker, whose credits also include Mulan and Hidden Figures, about the challenges of shooting Elvis, the cinematography and working with the DIT, DI and VFX.

• Director and Editor Talk Through  Workflow on American Murderer
• DP Chat: Learan Kahanov on Shooting Kevin Smith’s Clerks III
• Editor Austin Scott on Super-Teases  and More for MasterChef: Legends

Marvel and Netflix: Managing Media
Large studios, once personified by major theatrical releases and broadcast behoumouths, have given way to modern hybrids that can have a presence in the motion picture, network and streaming worlds. This new model includes companies like Netflix and Disney, among others. Also largely gone are the days of storing film in vaults — replaced by the benefits of nimble access to digital assets. But the move to digital assets delivers a host of complications as well. Now storage systems and procedures, as well as asset management, have become the heartbeat of these operations.

• Storage for Post Production: IDC and Running Man
• Virtual Roundtable: Storage
• Storage for Spots: How Utopic and Drive Thru Manage Their Media
• NVMe and CXL: Enabling More Powerful M&E Workflows

Andor, the new live-action Disney+ Star Wars series, is a gritty thriller rife with political intrigue and high stakes – along with plenty of hoverbikes, laser guns and other impressive visual effects. Set five years before Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the prequel explores a new perspective from the  Star Wars  galaxy and focuses on Cassian Andor’s journey to become a rebel hero. Editor John Gilroy, ACE, whose credits include Michael Clayton, Pacific Rim, The Bourne Legacy and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, edited four episodes and was a co-producer on the series. We spoke with Gilroy about the editing challenges, the show’s post workflow and collaborating again with his brothers — creator/showrunner Tony Gilroy and writer Dan Gilroy.

• Review: Nvidia’s RTX 4090 — An Editor’s Perspective
• Émoi on Composing Music for Horror Film The Accursed
• Behind the Title: Modern Post Editor/Colorist Max Ferigo

Reasonable Doubt, from executive producer and director Kerry Washington, is a new crime drama from Hulu and Onyx Collective. The series is centered on a high-powered female criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles, Jax Stewart (Emayatzy Corinealdi), who uses her questionable moral compass to guide her through the policies and laws in the LA legal system. Cinematographer Robert E. Arnold shot the show as a first-time alternating DP with co-DPs Kira Kelly, ASC, and Michael Negrin, ASC. I spoke with Arnold — whose credits include the TV series Astronomy Club and The Tam and Kevin Show as well as the award-winning film Gun and a Hotel Bible — about shooting the show and how he collaborated closely with the post team on the visual effects.

• TIFF: Editor Daniel Garber on How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• Review: Nvidia’s GeForce 4090
• Behind the Title: Carbon VFX Supe Tobey Lindback

FX/Hulu’s The Bear has become a classic after only eight episodes. The story of Carmy, an elite chef whose late brother willed him his Chicago restaurant, is frenetic, gritty and real. And the show’s editors — Joanna Naugle and Adam Epstein, ACE — were tasked with creating that feeling in the cut. Naugle is senior editor/co-owner of Brooklyn’s Senior Post, whose partner Josh Senior is an EP on The Bear. She has cut shows including Ramy, Human Resources and Some Good News. Epstein’s long roster of work includes SNL, The Other Two and Documentary Now! postPerspective recently chatted with the two editors.

• Colorist Chat: Outpost Montreal’s Beatrice Tremblay
• Composers: Creating the Score for Frozen Planet II
• Digital Domain De-Ages Joe Montana for Quantum Leap

 … Continue Reading

Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis has always pushed the limits of visual effects and animation with such films as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future and The Polar Express. His new film Pinocchio, which combines live-action and CGI with virtual production, is the latest retelling of the tale of the wooden puppet who longs to be a real boy. The Disney film stars Tom Hanks as Geppetto, the woodcarver who treats Pinocchio as if he were his actual son. Zemeckis’ team included longtime collaborators DP Don Burgess, ASC, VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie and VFX producer Sandra Scott. We spoke with Baillie (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Night at the Museum) about Pinocchio’s visual effects and the ground-breaking virtual production pipeline.

• New Ada Lovelace GPU Architecture From Nvidia
• Editor Stephanie Earley Talks Animated Musical Central Park
• Wacom’s New Tablet: The Cintiq Pro 27

We were thrilled to be back in person for IBC 2022! postPerspective TV shot interviews at our booth and around the show floor, all in an effort to deliver IBC to those who couldn’t make the trip to Amsterdam this year and to those who were at the show but couldn’t see it all. We hope you enjoy our extensive coverage of new technology, upcoming products and industry trends. It will be time well spent. This is the second of two video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos now, please click here to see our full archive!… Continue Reading

Money. Romance. Ambition. Success. Deception. Downfall. Conviction. Hulu’s limited series The Dropout, the story of Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) and Theranos, is a cautionary tale of Silicon Valley hustle, ambition and fame gone terribly wrong. It focuses on how this self-made female billionaire loses it all in the blink of an eye and ends up facing a potential 20-year jail sentence for fraud. The six-time Emmy-nominated limited series was directed and executive produced by Michael Showalter, who was nominated for his work on the episode, “Green Juice.” I spoke with Showalter, whose credits include The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Lovebirds and Oscar-nominated The Big Sick, about making the series and his love of post production.

• Editor Aaron I. Butler: Emotion and Workflow for HBO’s Euphoria
• DP Eric Koretz on Shooting Ozark’s Series Finale
• Lucy and Desi Documentary: Editor Robert A. Martinez

Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur has always been drawn to primal tales of man versus nature and the struggle to survive, whether they’re set on top of a frozen mountain (Everest) or at the bottom of the ocean (The Deep, Adrift). His latest survival story, Beast, swaps ice and water for the savannahs of Africa and pits man against an apex predator, a massive lion. It stars Idris Elba as a recently widowed doctor who takes his daughters on safari only to find that they’re the prey when a rogue lion who begins stalking them. The film was shot by Oscar winner Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC, and it was edited by Jay Rabinowitz, ACE. Visual effects supervisor Enrik Pavdeja led a team of animators from Framestore, both on-set and in post, for close to a year as they created the all-CG lion.

• Behind the Title: We Are Royale Designer Eduardo Guisandes
• Review: Veikk Studio VK2200 Pro Pen Display
• DP Anka Malatynska on Shooting Pretty Little Liars‘ Dark Reboot

We were thrilled to be back in person for SIGGRAPH 2022! postPerspective TV shot interviews at our booth and around the show floor, all in an effort to deliver SIGGRAPH to those who couldn’t make the trip to Vancouver this year and to those who were at the conference but couldn’t see it all. We hope you enjoy our extensive coverage of new technology, upcoming products and industry trends. It will be time well spent. This is the second of two video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos now, please click here to see our full archive!… Continue Reading

Bullet Train is a neon-infused, violent and hilarious Agatha Christie-style romp starring Brad Pitt and an ensemble of who’s who, including Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sandra Bullock. The film follows a plethora of assassins whose different missions all coalesce around a common thread: White Death, the leader of a Yakuza-like crime syndicate. It all takes place on a bullet train speeding from Tokyo to Kyoto. The film is directed by David Leitch (Deadpool 2) and based on a 2010 Japanese novel of the same name. At the center of this action-packed blockbuster are eye-popping visual effects. I recently spoke with DNeg VFX supervisor Stephen James (Dune, Deadpool 2, Blade Runner 2049) about the film, its challenges and the 1,015 shots the studio oversaw.

• Behind the Title: Alkemy X’s Michael Porterfield, 2D Head
• Creating the Animated Open for Reading Rainbow Live
• Nvidia Expands Omniverse With New AI, More at Siggraph

Nope director Jordan Peele has been churning out critically acclaimed films since his 2017 feature debut, Get Out, which earned four Oscar nominations — including a Best Original Screenplay win for Peele. He followed that up with another Oscar nom for co-producing Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman and his hit horror film Us. Peele’s newest film, Nope, combines horror and science fiction. To realize his ambitious vision for the project, Peele collaborated with IMAX and a team that included its head of post production, Bruce Markoe. We recently spoke with Peele and Markoe, who ran post at Marvel Studios for four years, about making the film and their collaboration.

• Emmy Quick Chat: Editing Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls
• Colorist Chat: Cheat Founder Toby Tomkins
• Editor Courtney Ware on Cutting Indie Film Acidman

The Terminal List director Antoine Fuqua has a gift for making highly charged emotional dramas and action films, including the 2001 crime thriller Training Day, The Equalizer franchise and Olympus Has Fallen. The Terminal List, a new Amazon Prime series based on the novel by Jack Carr, follows James Reece (Chris Pratt) after his platoon of Navy SEALs is ambushed during a mission. Reece returns home with conflicting memories of the event and questions about his culpability. We spoke with Fuqua — who executive produced along with Pratt and writer/showrunner David DiGilio — about making the series, working on the VFX with Oscar winner Rob Legato, ASC, and his love of post.

• Colorist for Our Flag Means Death on Blues, Lighting, More
• Behind the Title: Ari Rubenstein,Break+Enter Creative Director
• Good Luck to You, Leo Grande Editor Bryan Mason

Dopesick showrunner Danny Strong began his career acting in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer before transitioning into writing for films (Game Change, Lee Daniels’ The Butler), directing (TV’s Empire) and producing. His latest project, the Hulu limited series Dopesick, examines the true story of how one company — Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family— triggered the worst drug epidemic in American history. The series takes viewers to the epicenter of America’s struggle with opioid addiction. Strong created, wrote, directed and ran Dopesick, a story he says he was compelled to tell. I spoke to him about making the show, working with Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson and the post workflow.

• Tribeca Film: Editing Indie Wes Schlagenhauf Is Dying
• Prehistoric Planet: Mixing Wildlife Footage and VFX
• HPA Net Event Report: Color Grading in the Cloud

Irish director Lenny Abrahamson’s Normal People, the Hulu series based on Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel, was streamed more than 63 million times since its 2020 release, and it scored an Emmy nom for Abrahamson. His follow up, Conversations With Friends, is based on Rooney’s debut novel and takes on big issues — sex, politics, relationships — as it follows two college students who become involved with a married couple. This 12-part Hulu limited series was also executive produced by Abrahamson, whose credits also include the Oscar-nominated Room, The Little Stranger and cult indies Frank, Garage and Adam & Paul. I spoke to him about making the show and his love of post and editing.

• Re-Recording Mixer Nick Offord on Pam & Tommy and The Offer
• Colorist Chat: The Mill Shanghai’s Nikola Stefanović
• Composer Jonathan Beard on 3 Seconds in October Doc

It’s hard to believe, but it’s been nearly 30 years since Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park wowed audiences and rewrote the book on VFX, bringing to life such dinosaurs as the terrifying T.rex. Now they’re back in Jurassic World Dominion, the final film in the second trilogy. Directed by Colin Trevorrow, who helmed the previous movie, it takes place four years after Isla Nublar was destroyed. Dinosaurs now live — and hunt — alongside humans all over the world. Behind the camera, Trevorrow was joined by EP Spielberg; DP John Schwartzman, ASC, who shot Jurassic World; editor Mark Sanger; and visual effects supervisor David Vickery. ILM once again created all the visual effects. I talked with Trevorrow about working with Spielberg, the challenges involved in making and posting the film, and the cutting-edge VFX.

• DP Eric Koretz on Shooting Ozark‘s Series Finale, More
• NAB: Storage for Media and Entertainment

It’s been 36 years since Top Gun, directed by the late great Tony Scott, introduced audiences to Tom Cruise as Navy pilot Lt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. Now the iconic character and heart-pounding aerial maneuvers are back in Top Gun: Maverick. Directed by Joseph Kosinski and shot by his go-to cinematographer, Claudio Miranda, ASC, the Paramount release picks up the story of Mitchell, who, after more than 30 years of service, is still pushing the envelope as a test pilot and dodging any advancement in rank that would ground him. But he does get grounded, and finds himself training a group of hotshot young Top Gun graduates for a dangerous mission. Kosinski assembled a top-flight team behind the scenes that included editor Eddie Hamilton and VFX supervisor Ryan Tudhope. We spoke with Kosinski about making the film, the post workflow and cracking the secret of the original film’s sound design.

• DP Chat: Johanna Coelho

The trippy Emmy-winning Netflix show Russian Doll is back for a second season — great news for anyone who’s interested in the space-time continuum but who also loves surreal comedy-drama. Natasha Lyonne created the series with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler. Lyonne stars as Nadia, who is caught in a time loop, dying and then coming back to relive the night of her 36th birthday. Her friend Alan is stuck in the loop with her. The second season is set four years after Nadia and Alan escaped mortality’s time loop together. Now they are delving deeper into their pasts through an unexpected time portal located in the NYC subway. Todd Downing, ACE, who was nominated for HPA and ACE Awards for Season 1 of Russian Doll, has returned as editor for Season 2. I spoke with Downing, about the show.

• Composer Nathan Halpern on Music for Watcher and Emily the Criminal
• Behind the Title: AFX Creative VFX Supervisor Tom Connors
• CG Grooming: Victor Garza

DC Comics’ Caped Crusader has been gracing our big and small screens for decades. While some have been campy, the newest Batman movie skews dark. Director Matt Reeves’ latest take on Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) in The Batman takes us to a very gritty version of Gotham. No superhero film is possible without extensive visual effects work, and The Batman is no exception, with numerous top-flight effects houses contributing to the film, including New Zealand-based WetaFX. I recently spoke with Weta visual effects supervisor Anders Langlands about the visual effects studio’s work bringing The Batman to life. “The biggest and most exciting scene was the highway chase. We also did all the work on the Batcave and the City Hall environment for the mayor’s memorial sequence.”

• Review: Boxx’s Alder Lake Apexx S3 Workstation
• Behind the Title: Whitehouse Editor Brian Gannon
• Digital Domain: Over 500

Andrea Chlebak is a senior colorist at Harbor in Los Angeles. She works on episodic television and feature films, partnering with directors, DPs and showrunners along the way. She recently collaborated with director Adrian Lyne on the feature Deep Water, just finished up Hulu’s The Girl From Plainville and, after a well-earned vacation, is starting on a Netflix feature called Happiness for Beginners. Her path to the colorist suite started in the film lab. Well, it was actually more film lab adjacent. “I didn’t work in the lab, but I worked a lot with the people from the lab — the artists and timers – and I learned all about color timing. When the company shifted into a digital intermediate company, they purchased Arrilasers and a FilmLight Baselight. I looked at that setup and said, ‘That’s where I want to be.'” I recently spoke to Chlebak for a new segment we are calling “Meet the Artist.” Over… Continue Reading

Some people took up knitting, making bread or drinking lots of wine during the pandemic. Others (OK, me) became obsessed with British crime dramas. One of those shows is BBC One’s Shetland (now streaming Season 6 on BritBox). The series takes place on Shetland, an archipelago located north of mainland Scotland, closer to Norway than Edinburgh. It follows Insepector Jimmy Perez and his detectives, Tosh and Sandy, as they tackle what is a considerable amount of murdering for such a small and remote place. Much of the show takes place in various locations on Shetland, with a couple of set pieces like the police station and Jimmy’s home. While gorgeous, Shetland’s climate can change frequently; it can get cold and windy very quickly but also turn bright and sunny, which oftentimes made shooting – and continuity — challenging. Season 6 was shot by Block 1 DP Alfie Biddle (who worked with director Max Myers) and Block 2 DP Simon Walton… Continue Reading

The rollercoaster ride and intense angst of high school has long been a rich vein to mine for drama, and the HBO show Euphoria has drilled down deep. Now in its second season, Euphoria follows a group of high school students navigating love and friendships in a world of drugs, sex and trauma. An American adaptation of an Israeli show of the same name, it’s written, directed and EP’d by Sam Levinson and features a large ensemble cast that includes Zendaya, Maude Apatow, Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney. Aaron I. Butler, ACE, an Emmy Award-winning editor, joined the show’s editing team — which includes Julio Perez and Laura Zemple — on this new second season. I spoke with Butler, whose credits include the IMAX film Jesus is King for Kanye West, about the editing challenges and his workflow on his first scripted television show.

• Review: Huion Inspiroy Keydial KD200 Pen Tablet
• DP Chat: Jendra Jarnagin Talks Shooting Indie Asking

The last time a Spider-Man film got any Oscar love in the visual effects category was in 2004 with Spider-Man 2, but all that has changed with the recent Spider-Man: No Way Home. The Oscar-nominated VFX team on director Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: No Way Home was led by Kelly Port, Chris Waegner, Scott Edelstein and Dan Sudick. Port, Marvel’s VFX supervisor on the film (on loan from Digital Domain), oversaw some 2,500 VFX shots with work done by many vendors. These effects included visually stunning set pieces, in addition to resurrecting such VFX-driven characters as Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Sandman and Electro. I recently spoke with Port, who was previously Oscar-nominated for his work on Avengers: Infinity War, about working on the film, the VFX pipeline and the challenges involved.

• DP Chat: Carl Herse Talks The Afterparty‘s Workflow and Look
• How to Survive the Shifting Post Production Paradigm
• Editor Robin Blotnick on

Writer/director Aaron Sorkin and DP Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, first worked together on the David Fincher-directed film The Social Network. Now Sorkin and Cronenweth have reteamed on Being the Ricardos, Sorkin’s behind-the-scenes comedy/drama starring Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (both Oscar-nominated for their roles), the power couple behind the beloved 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Using flashbacks and B&W reenactments of the couple’s show to examine their professional and private lives, Sorkin also compresses time by setting and staging the story during a single week of production on I Love Lucy. In addition to Cronenweth, Sorkin called on production designer Jon Hutman; editor Alan Baumgarten, ACE; and composer Daniel Pemberton, all of whom worked on Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7.

• Sundance Award Winner: Post Sound on Headhunter’s Daughter
• Sound Mixer Tammy Douglas

Oscar-winning writer/director Adam McKay has become one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood thanks to such hits as Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Big Short, Vice and Marvel’s Ant-Man. His new film is another comedy/drama/action mashup, the apocalyptic satire Don’t Look Up. The Netflix film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth. There are A-listers galore, tons of locations, ambitious set pieces and lots of visual effects. McKay also assembled an equally stellar team behind the scenes, including his go-to editor Hank Corwin, ACE; DP Linus Sandgren, ASC, FSF; composer Nicholas Britell; and VFX supervisor Raymond Gieringer. I spoke with McKay and Corwin about making the film.

• Sundance 2022: Lam Nguyen on Editing Comedy/Thriller Emergency
• Review: Dell XPS 17 Creator Edition
• Director Ijaaz Noohu Discusses KOAD Music Video Jaunty

Since making his first film (Four Letter Words) back in 2000, indie writer/director/editor Sean Baker has created a body of work that is provocative, edgy and heartfelt. His last film, The Florida Project, premiered at Cannes in 2017 and went on to earn an Oscar nom for co-star Willem Dafoe. His new film, Red Rocket, stars Simon Rex as a hustler and fading porn star who returns home to Texas and tries to reinvent himself. Here, Baker talks about making the award-nominated film, editing his own work and his love of post production.

• Review: Digital Anarchy’s Transcriptive Rough Cutter
• Editing Docs: Shrader Thomas on Magnolia’s ‘Hi I’m Sevy’
• Remembering the Very Memorable Martin Parsons

We take a look back at some of the best Editing stories of the past year, including Ted Lasso Sound of Metal, The Crown, Hacks and more. Enjoy!

• Editing Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso: Melissa McCoy and AJ Catoline
• Oscar Winner: Sound of Metal Editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen
• Yan Miles Talks Editing The Crown‘s ‘Fairytale’
• Cruella Editor Tatiana Riegel: Workflows During Covid
• Amy Duddleston on Editing Mare of Easttown
• Hacks’ Emmy-Nominated Editor Jessica Brunetto

Indie film writer/director Mike Mills is a master at creating intimate films about big issues, including family dynamics, love and the human condition, and his interest always stems from personal experience. Beginners, which won an Oscar for star Christopher Plummer, was loosely based on his father. His latest film, C’mon C’mon, was similarly inspired by real-life experience. It tells the story of how Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle-aged radio journalist, ends up taking care of his sister’s 9-year-old son, Jesse (Woody Norman). Here, Mills, who’s also a graphic designer and artist, talks about making the awards-buzzy black-and-white film and his love of post.

• Hardware-Accelerated HEVC in Adobe Premiere
• Carla Gutierrez on Editing Julia Child Documentary
• Post Chat: Sound Editor/Mixer George Foulgham

Director Jorge R. Gutiérrez’s Maya and the Three is an animated Netflix series that tells the story of Maya (Zoe Saldana), a warrior princess in pre-colonial Mesoamerica. To save her family and humanity, she must fight alongside three legendary warriors to defeat the gods of the underworld. Audio post veteran Scott Gershin led the team at The Sound Lab, a Keywords Studio, that brought Gutiérrez’s epic visual landscape to life with sound. With a resume that includes the films The Book of Life, Pacific Rim and American Beauty, as well as the series Mrs. America, Gershin was up to the challenge.

• Colorist Chat: Stephen Nakamura on Look of Tick, Tick… Boom!
• Review: Acon’s DeVerberate 3 and Extract:Dialogue
• VFX: A Conversation with Dune‘s Visual Effects Team

Jane Campion’s The Piano racked up nine Academy Award nods and three wins, including an Oscar win for her writing and a best director nomination — only the second woman to ever be named in the category. The New Zealand-born Campion also became the first female director to win the Cannes Palme d’Or for Best Film in 1993. Campion’s latest feature, The Power of the Dog, tells the story of two ranch-owning brothers living in 1925 Montana — prickly Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and mild-mannered George (Jesse Plemons), who have nothing in common other than their disdain for one another.

• Colorist Chat: Dave Cole on Dune, Working With DP
• Composer Alexander Arntzen: Scoring an Action Film
• Panel: Neurodiversity in Post Brings A Variety of Benefits

The new Warner Bros. film King Richard is getting a lot of attention this awards season, especially for its star, Will Smith. In this true story, Smith plays Richard, the driven father of Venus and Serena Williams, who had the unwavering belief that his daughters could be tennis legends. The film was helmed by indie director Reinaldo Marcus Green, whose credits include the Netflix series Top Boy and feature Joe Bell, starring Mark Wahlberg. The behind-the-scenes creative team includes director of photography Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) and editor Pamela Martin (Battle of the Sexes). I talked to Green, who’s also getting awards attention, about making the film, post, editing and visual effects.

• Networking for Post: Beyond 10GigE
• Anatomy of a Scene: Directing Not Going Quietly Doc
• Behind the Title: Bandit Editor Zeke O’Donnell

The film The Harder They Fall is a full-out Western starring Idris Elba, Regina King, LaKeith Stansfield and Jonathan Majors. Directed by Jeymes Samuel and streaming on Netflix, it focuses on outlaw Nat Love (Majors), who gets his gang back together to take down enemy Rufus Buck (Elba), a crime boss who just got out of prison. While the film is what the director calls a “revisionist Western,” its characters are based on real people. We caught up with the film’s editor, New Zealand-based Tom Eagles (Jojo Rabbit), to find out more.

• Review: Apple MacBook Pro 2021
• Anatomy of a Main Title: Agents of Chaos Documentary
• Behind the Title: Cutters Comedy Editor John Dingfield

Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, ASC, has shot many projects for Ridley Scott, including The Martian, All the Money in the World, Prometheus, Exodus: Gods and Kings and Alien: Covenant. Their latest collaboration is The Last Duel, a tale of betrayal and vengeance set against the brutality of 14th century France, starring Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Ben Affleck and Jodie Comer. The historical epic  — shot on location in France and Ireland — unravels long-held assumptions about France’s last sanctioned duel between Jean de Carrouges (Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Driver), two friends turned bitter rivals. I talked to Wolski, whose other credits include his Oscar-nominated work on News of the World and four films in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, about the challenges of shooting the film, the cinematography, dealing with VFX and post, and working with Scott.

• Video: A Conversation With Marvel’s Evan Jacobs
• Review: iZotope RX

elcome to NAB Season 2021. While there is no physical NAB show this year, many companies are still introducing new tools and promoting product updates and initiatives. In order to report on that news, postPerspective has brought the “virtual” show to you via Zoom interviews with post pros and those who make the gear they use. We hope you enjoy all our coverage of user thoughts and industry trends. We can’t all be together for NAB, but this is our way of keeping our community connected. This is the last of three video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos, please click here to see our full archive!… Continue Reading

Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve is well-versed in making ambitious and provocative sci-fi films, including Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. His latest is Dune, which is based on Frank Herbert’s novel of the same name. Set thousands of years in the future, it stars Timothée Chalamet as a young man propelled into an intergalactic power struggle that brings him to the remote planet Arrakis. Here he finds inhospitable heat, hurricane-strength sandstorms and monstrous sandworms. To create all this, Villeneuve assembled a team of Academy Award-winning and nominated creatives that he has worked with before, including production designer Patrice Vermette, editor Joe Walker and visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert.

• Anatomy of a Scene: Scoring HBO’s Level Playing Field
• Networking for Post Production — 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• Behind the Title: Jessie Amadio — MPC VFX Supervisor

The Wonder Years has returned to ABC, paying homage to the original 1988 coming-of-age narrative, while also carving its own path. Set in 1968, the show follows 12-year-old Dean Williams and his family’s experiences as a Black middle-class family in Montgomery, Alabama. An adult version of Dean provides a narration of his friendships, love interests and growing pains alongside the struggles of growing up Black at that time. Composers Roahn Hylton and Jacob Yoffee bring the spirit of the time to life with a period-inspired soundtrack steeped in the R&B roots of the era. The pair — who work side by side at their LA-based Th3rdstream Studios — kindly chatted with me to share insight into their creative process.

• Distancing Socially: Film Shot on iPhones, Posted Remotely
• Networking for Post — Getting Oriented
• Anatomy of a Scene — Director Ben Simms on Interactive Feature

If you’ve watched Marvel’s WandaVision, you can imagine that the production and post workflows were challenging, to say the least. The series features multiple time periods, B&W footage, color footage, lots of complex visual effects and the list goes on. Colorist Matt Watson and the in-house Marvel post team had their hands full and their creative hats on. To help with any challenges that might come up, Watson got involved from the very beginning — during camera tests — and that, along with being on set, proved to be invaluable. “I’ve set up several Marvel shows with a DI toolset and mindset,” reports Watson. “Having that resource on set at the start of a production really helps to find answers to color pipelines and workflow direction, and WandaVision had many challenges.”

• Review: Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium Bundle
• Behind the Title: Roof Director Lucas Camargo
• Music Mixer Phil McGowan on Cobra Kai Workflow

Director Destin Daniel Cretton is best known for his work on Just Mercy and The Glass Castle, emotionally powerful, low-budget dramas that focused on characters and behavior, not spectacle and visual effects. So it was a big surprise to many when the indie director was tapped by Marvel to helm its VFX-heavy new tentpole Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, an action-packed origin story featuring Marvel’s first Asian superhero. But the gamble has paid off, with Cretton combining intricate, cross-generational family dynamics with dazzling action, martial arts, monsters and VFX in a mega-budget epic blockbuster.

• Colorist Chat: Jeremy Sawyer on American Horror Story
• Billions‘ Female-Centric Post Team on Adapting to Remote Workflows
• Anatomy of a Scene: Creating the Score for BBC’s Primates

Cinematographer Alice Brooks is having a monster year. First was her inspired work on In the Heights, the film adaptation of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical directed by Jon M. Chu. Next up is Tick, Tick…Boom! for Netflix, which comes out later this year. Also a musical, it’s helmed by Miranda, in his feature directorial debut, and produced by Ron Howard. Brooks has worked with Chu since their days as film students at the University of Southern California nearly 20 years ago. Brooks describes filming In the Heights as the highlight of their long collaboration and her individual career. I spoke with Brooks about the challenges of shooting In the Heights, the cinematography, lighting and working with the DIT, colorists and VFX teams.

• Maxon Updates Cinema 4D, Red Giant Trapcode and More
• Anatomy of a Scene: Demonic DP Byron Kopman
• Review: Logickeyboard’s Astra 2 Backlit Editing Keyboard

This summer, Warner Bros. resurrected the beloved Space Jam franchise for the 21st century with the Malcolm D. Lee-directed Space Jam: A New Legacy. In addition to Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and other classic Looney Tunes characters, it stars LeBron James and Don Cheadle. Set to release on Blu-ray and DVD next month, this Space Jam iteration tells the story of a fictionalized James, who is trying to rescue his son from the clutches of Cheadle’s Al G. Rhythm. To do this, he must play a digitized game of basketball alongside the Looney Tunes gang. Bringing this universe to life sonically was no small task, but veteran re-recording mixer Tim LeBlanc. We recently caught up with LeBlanc, whose past credits include Aquaman, Godzilla and The Tomorrow War. He walks us through his workflow on the film.

• Live Broadcast, Post Workflows for Sci-Fi Series Orbital Redux
• Behind the Title: Amanda Rivera, Avocados & Coconuts Editor
• Safeguarding Media in the

If you are one of the few who hasn’t seen Apple TV+’s feel-good series Ted Lasso, here is a very quick rundown without giving too much away: An American college football coach from the Midwest is recruited to manage a European football club in England (long story), bringing with him no real knowledge of the sport. Ted (Jason Sudeikis) is a non-tea-drinking fish out of water who, through sheer likeability and charm, succeeds at being a fantastic human while making those around him better people in the process. The show’s first season was nominated for 20 Emmy Awards, including for best comedy series and two nods for best editing in a comedy series. We reached out to editors Melissa McCoy and AJ Catoline to talk about their nominated episodes, their workflows and walking the line between drama and comedy.

• Hacks’ Emmy-Nominated Editor Jessica Brunetto
• Behind the Title: Uppercut Editor Paul La Calandra
• Emmy-Nominated Sound for The Underground Railroad

Welcome to SIGGRAPH Season 2021. While there is no physical SIGGRAPH show this year, many companies are still introducing new tools and promoting product updates and initiatives. In order to report on that news, postPerspective has brought the “virtual” show to you via Zoom interviews with VFX pros and those who make the gear they use. We hope you enjoy all our coverage of user thoughts and industry trends. We can’t all be together for SIGGAPH, but this is our way of keeping our community connected. This is the second of two video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos, please click here to see our full archive!… Continue Reading

Welcome to SIGGRAPH Season 2021. While there is no physical SIGGRAPH show this year, many companies are still introducing new tools and promoting product updates and initiatives. In order to report on that news, postPerspective has brought the “virtual” show to you via Zoom interviews with VFX pros and those who make the gear they use. We hope you enjoy all our coverage of user thoughts and industry trends. We can’t all be together for SIGGAPH, but this is our way of keeping our community connected. This is the first of two video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos, please click here to see our full archive!… Continue Reading

The Fast & Furious series made an explosive return to theatres last month, with director Justin Lin’s latest offering, F9: The Fast Saga. The film sees the return of Vin Diesel as Dom Torretto, accompanied by an ensemble cast that includes Michelle Rodriguez, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, John Cena and Tyrese Gibson. F9 delivers fast cars, spectacular explosions and, of course, reminds us what life is all about: family. We recently spoke to re-recording mixers Jon Taylor and Frank Montaño, who work at NBCUniversal StudioPost, about keeping a soundtrack chock-full of roaring engines fresh and impactful.

• Colorist Chat: FotoKem’s Alastor Arnold on The Green Knight, More
• Behind the Title: The New Blank ECD Sevrin Daniels
• Mixing Season 2: James Parnell Talks Netflix’s Trinkets

Since its premiere on Netflix four seasons ago, The Crown has become a favorite of critics and an addiction for its audience. Historical fiction based on real events, this series gives viewers a glimpse at what “might” have been going on behind closed doors with England’s royal family. The Emmys have loved the show as well, with this year being no different — it was nominated for 24 awards. One of those nominations belongs to Yan Miles, ACE, who has edited six episodes of The Crown since the series began. For this most recent season, he cut Episode 3, “Fairytale.” Season 4 of The Crown first aired in November of 2020, giving those still in Covid lockdown something to binge. Fortunately, production was nearly finished by the time the UK shut down completely back in March of last year, avoiding many of the delays that hindered other productions.

• Resorts World Vegas Uses Virtual Production for Short Film
• Composer Mikel Hurwitz on Comedy-Horror Film 

Elisabeth Moss, who stars as June Osborne in the multi-Emmy Award-winning Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, has made her directing debut in the show’s fourth season. The series tackles very dark themes, including woman as slaves, civil war, economic chaos and power-crazed leaders. WThe show is based on the dystopian and prescient 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood. The author has noted that everything she wrote about 36 years ago has now happened somewhere in the world today. We spoke with Moss, who also stars in the upcoming Wes Anderson film The French Dispatch and Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins, about directing the show, post production and visual effects.

• Ghost VFX Recreates Chicago for Shameless Final Season
• Director Natasha Lee on Her AAPI Doc In the Visible
• Review: Nugen’s Paragon Reverb Plugin

Aussie director Craig Gillespie is well-known for his sharp and offbeat comedy sensibility, on display in such films as Lars and the Real Girl and I, Tonya. Those gifts are now showcased in Disney’s Cruella, the live-action film starring Emma Stone as the legendary cartoon villainess Cruella de Vil. Inspired by Disney’s 1961 animated film 101 Dalmatians, and now set in the punk era of ’70s London, Cruella is an origin story and the tale of how a gifted young girl evolved into the stylishly vengeful Cruella de Vil. Gillespie assembled a team that included DP Nicolas Karakatsanis, editor Tatiana Riegel, music supervisor Susan Jacobs, VFX supervisor Max Wood and composer Nicholas Britell. We caught up with Gillespie about making the film, the VFX and the post. Editor Riegel joined the conversation.

• VFX From Scanline for Godzilla vs. Kong
• Spiral: From the Book of Saw Composer Charlie Clouser
• Rumble VFX Creates 100 Shots for Pennyworth S2

Kari Skogland is a prolific and successful director of TV dramas. Her long list of credits includes The Handmaid’s Tale, Boardwalk Empire, The Walking Dead, The Americans and House of Cards. No wonder Marvel tapped her to direct and executive produce The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, a six-part Disney+ series that takes place following the events of Avengers: Endgame. With odd couple Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes taking on timely issues, including racism, the result is “an epic, character-driven story,” says Skogland. “We get to go inside these characters and their world in a much more intimate way. If the movies were a snack, this six-hour series is the meal. And it has all of the wonderful things that come with the MCU — action, comedy, a high-octane pace, familiar faces and new characters. It’s incredibly relatable.”

• DIT Chat: Tyler Isaacson on Workflow, Best Practices
• Behind the Title: Kamen Markov, MPC Senior VFX Supervisor
• DP Chat: Snowfall

Emerald Fennell’s film Promising Young Woman can be hard to describe. “Disturbing” might be the first word that comes to mind, but it’s so much more than that — in fact, it’s essentially many types of movies in one. It begins as a revenge drama that turns into a romantic comedy that evolves into a thriller and then a murder mystery. The film stars Carey Mulligan as an obsessed woman seeking revenge for her friend’s death and desperately trying to find a man who will prove her wrong — that not every male is a degenerate that, given the opportunity, will take advantage of a compromised young woman. Promising Young Woman was written and directed by Fennell and deftly edited by Frédéric Thoraval, who received his first Oscar nomination for his work as well as an ACE Eddie and BAFTA nomination.

• GTC 2021: New GPU Cards, Omniverse and More
• Composer on Gets Good Light, Elizabeth Phillipson-Weiner
• Maxon Unveils Cinema 4D Subscription Release 24

Over her career as an actress, Robin Wright has worked with many of Hollywood’s top directors, including Rob Reiner, David Fincher, Robert Zemeckis and M. Night Shyamalan. But while performing in front of the camera, this award-winning actress has also been quietly building her directing resume. In addition to playing Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Wright served as an EP and directed several episodes over all six seasons. Now Wright has directed her first feature film, Land, in which she also stars. It’s a powerful and confident debut, and a beautifully shot and directed movie that follows the journey of Edee Holzer (Wright), newly widowed and stunned by tragedy, who jettisons her old life in exchange for a spartan cabin and a solitary existence in the remote mountain wilderness of Wyoming.

• DP Chat: Robert Benavides on Hip Hop Uncovered
• Virtual Production: Duckwrth Music Video Gets Fast Turnaround
• Behind the Title: Level

Director Shaka King has been getting a lot of attention for his powerful and timely debut film, Judas and the Black Messiah. In fact, he picked up two Oscar nominations for his efforts, one for his role as producer (Best Picture) and one for writing (Best Original Screenplay). The film’s behind-the-scenes creative team includes DP Sean Bobbitt, BSC, editor Kristan Sprague, supervising sound editor Rich Bologna and re-recording mixer Skip Lievsay, CAS. I spoke with King, whose credits include Random Acts of Flyness for HBO and People of Earth for TBS, about his work on the film and his self-declared love of post.

• 2021 HPA Tech Retreat: Content in the Cloud
• Colorist Chat: Daniel Dode on Indie Film The Pink Cloud
• Netflix’s The Crew Composer Alec Puro

As the son of filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Azazel Jacobs grew up surrounded by artists and influenced by the appeal of experimental, nonlinear cinema. But the French Exit director forged his own path, writing and helming indie films, including Momma’s Man and The Lovers.

Along the way he’s learned how to take a more conventional story and infuse it with his own mix of satire, melancholy and seriousness. Such is the case with his latest film, the story of broke 60-year-old Manhattan socialite Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer).

• Adobe Creative Cloud Video March 2021 Updates
• DP Chat: Coming 2 America‘s Joe ‘Jody’ Williams
• Remembering Sean Mullen

We’ve all needed to find ways to escape reality since the pandemic began, and movies have given many of us that much-needed transport. They allow us to get lost in a different time and a different place. Two films that were just what 2020 needed were Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 and Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. These two blockbusters each tell the story of a hero who must fight to save the world, but they have more than that in common: supervising sound editor and sound designer Richard King. This four-time Oscar winner’s collection of credits includes Inception, Master And Commander, War of the Worlds, Dunkirk, Interstellar and the Dark Knight films. Here he shares his general philosophy when it comes to sound design, and how he applied that to create these two excellent, yet vastly different, sonic experiences.

• Review: OWC’s Envoy Pro Elektron USB-C Hard Drive
• Sundance Q&A: Jockey Editor Parker Laramie
• Sundance Q&A: Cinque

Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso tells the story of a relentlessly optimistic and folksy American college football coach, who — though he’s totally unqualified — is hired to manage an English Premiere League football team (aka soccer). Naturally, comedy ensues as the fish-out-of-water Lasso attempts to get up to speed on the soccer front, while also navigating the differences between two cultures separated by a common language. Audiences loved the series, created by veteran television writer, producer and director Bill Lawrence and its star Jason Sudeikis, and so did the Golden Globes. The show was recognized for Sudeikis’ performance, and the show itself was nominated for Best TV Series — Musical or Comedy.

• Sundance Q&A: Cryptozoo Editor Lance Edmands
• Sundance Q&A: Rebel Hearts DP Emily Topper
• Virtual Panel: Predicting the Future of Post — Lessons From 2020

As the saying goes, there are two things for certain: death and taxes. But for most of us, death will come through natural causes and not murder. That cannot be said for the mother of Madison Hamburg, the filmmaker behind HBO’s Murder on Middle Beach. This four-episode docuseries focuses on Hamburg’s investigation of the 2010 murder of his mother, Barbara. The sound for this documentary is composed, quite literally, of many moments tied to Hamburg’s life. To find out more about the audio post side of the film, I reached out to supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Annie Medlin and sound effects editor Alex Loew.

• Sundance Q&A: Editor Jeff Boyette on Amy Tan Doc
• Sundance Q&A: DP Sam Levy on Mayday
• Sundance Q&A: Editor Lam Nguyen on R#J

Oscar-winner Ron Howard is one of Hollywood’s most beloved and versatile directors and producers. Since his directorial debut in 1977 with Grand Theft Auto, he’s made an eclectic group of films about boxers, astronauts, mermaids, politicians, mathematicians and more, so it was probably only a matter of time before he directed his attention to hillbillies. Based on the J.D. Vance memoir of the same name, Howard’s latest film, Hillbilly Elegy, is a modern exploration of the American dream — and the nightmare of poverty and opioid addiction. Howard, who assembled a crew that included DP Maryse Alberti; editor James Wilcox, ACE; and composers Hans Zimmer and David Fleming, recently talked with me about directing the Netflix film and his love of post.

• Color Grade of Netflix’s The Crown Evolves
• Digital Cinematography: A Conversation on the Craft
• Streamland Media to Acquire Technicolor Post

You don’t have to be a college football fan to enjoy the Reginald Hudlin-directed film Safety, which tells the story of Clemson football player Ray McElrathbey. To tell this story for Disney+, the filmmakers tried a fresh spin on remote workflows inspired by episodic productions.The pipeline concept, designed by executive producer Doug Jones, applied episodic television technology to a feature film pipeline. Feature film production tends to be more slow moving, while episodic television comes with fast turnaround times. This led Jones to a super-efficient “online-all-the-time” pipeline that could save time and money.

• Review: Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card
• Editing and Music Tell Story in Amazon Aid Video
• Behind the Title: Ataboy Founder/CD Vikkal Parikh

The story of this year was obviously the horrible pandemic. Our amazing industry developed different ways to work while staying efficient and safe. Here we take a look at some of our best Remote Workflow stories from the year.… Continue Reading

If you haven’t seen the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, then I suggest you run — don’t walk — to a screen and start binging. This charming fish-out-of-water story stars Jason Sudeikis as Ted, a college football coach whose hokey, saccharine brand of Midwestern positivity is transported to England when he is hired to coach the AFC Richmond football (soccer) club. The jaded team and its front office serve as the perfect foil for Lasso, who wins them over one by one with what we discover is tried-and-true optimism. Sound designer Brent Findley was called on to help craft the show’s sound, and he immediately became a fan as well as a collaborator.

• Review: Threadripper Pro-Based Lenovo ThinkStation P620
• Behind the Title: Cut + Run Editor Jen Dean
• Jellyfish’s Best Practices for Working Remotely and Globally

Not long after Dell announced its newest top-end HDR monitor, the UltraSharp 32 HDR PremierColor UP3221Q back in early October, they sent me one to test out. The UP3221Q is an HDR1000-certified 31.5-inch UHD display with 1000 nits of brightness, displaying images from HDMI, DisplayPort or Thunderbolt inputs. It can display both HLG and HDR10 PQ content and has a built-in colorimeter for precise calibration. The backlight has over 2,000 independently controllable mini-LEDs (or dimming zones) to control the brightness in different areas of the screen, allowing higher overall contrast.

• Best of Review: Nvidia’s GeForce 3090 Series
• Best of Review: Autodesk Flame 2021
• Best of Review: GoPro Hero9 Black

 … Continue Reading

British director/writer/producer Steve McQueen burst onto the international scene in 2013 when his harrowing 12 Years a Slave dominated awards season, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Now McQueen is back with Small Axe, the BBC-produced anthology of five feature-length stories about London’s West Indian immigrant population and its struggles. The series, streaming on Amazon Prime, comprises five titles — Mangrove, Lovers Rock, Alex Wheatle, Education and Red, White and Blue — all set from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, and all based on true stories except for the joyous, all-night party film Lovers Rock.

• Review: Hit‘n’Mix Infinity 4.7 Audio Editing Software
• DP Chat: Jörg Widmer on The Book of Vision and More
• Nice Shoes’ Maria Carretero on Color Grade for Waikiki

Halloween might be over, but our collective love of scary movies lives on. Last month, Hulu delivered Books of Blood, a creepy horror anthology based on Clive Barker’s 1984 book series of the same name. Directed and co-written by Brannon Braga, the film weaves together three stories, which at first seem to function as independent episodes before being tied together in the final chapter. Books of Blood jumps between sets of characters, one of whom (Jenna) has a neurological disorder called misophonia, which is when certain sounds trigger rage or panic. The sensory disorder plays a big role in the film. LA’s King Soundworks provided the audio post, largely during the pandemic.

• Review: Canon’s DP-V3120 4K HDR Reference Display
• Colorist Chat: Juan Cabrera on Path and Workflow
• Review: Larry Jordan’s ‘Techniques of Visual Persuasion’

Director Antonio Campos made a name for himself with his debut 2008 feature Afterschool, which premiered at Cannes. He followed that film with the Sundance hits Simon Killer and Christine. Campos, who also plays in the episodic world, directed the pilot of USA’s Emmy-nominated series, The Sinner. He is currently serving as an executive producer for the show, which is ramping up for its fourth season. His latest film, Netflix’s The Devil All the Time, is a gothic epic set in the 1940s-1960s that weaves together stories of the families, preachers, cops and killers who inhabit small towns in Ohio and West Virginia.

• VFX Supervisor Doug Larmour on The Alienist: Angel of Darkness
• Adobe Max 2020: What’s New in Premiere and After Effects
• Behind the Title: Blue Table Post EP/Owner Oliver Lief

 … Continue Reading

The makers of Disney’s live-action Mulan devoted an enormous amount of time and creativity to planning and executing the way color would be used to enhance the storytelling and evoke each scene’s emotional content. The feast of color that audiences experienced watching Mulan was the result of preparation from director Niki Caro, cinematographer Mandy Walker (ASC, ACS), production designer Grant Major and colorist Natasha Leonnet of post house Company 3.

• Working in HDR: AJA’s Kona 5 I/O Card
• Colorist Rory Gordon Talks SMPTE Paper and Lovecraft Country
• Nvidia’s New RTX A6000 Top-Tier Visualization Card

From the mind of Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers, Lost), HBO’s Watchmen was the most Emmy-nominated series this year. It scored 11 wins, including Outstanding Limited Series. Executive producer Nicole Kassell took home her first Emmy Award for the series, and she was nominated for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie or Dramatic Special for the episode, “It’s Summer and We’re Running Out of Ice.” Kassell, who won a DGA Award this year for her work on the show’s pilot, also directed Episode 2 and Episode 8. She has been one of the most in-demand female filmmakers, having directed numerous episodes of such critically acclaimed series as Westworld, The Leftovers, The Killing and The Americans.

• Review: Nvidia’s Ampere-Based GeForce 3090 Series
• Audio Post: Challenge and Fun of Improv on Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Avid and Adobe: Collaborating for Easier Editing Workflows

With 26 Emmy nominations, HBO’s Watchmen netted the most nods of any series this year. In the most recent interpretation of the popular graphic novel, we spend a lot of our time in Tulsa, Oklahoma, getting to know Regina King’s policewoman Angela Abar, her unconventional family and a shadowy organization steeped in racism called the Seventh Kavalry. We also get a look back — beautiful in black and white — at Abar’s tragic family back story. Greg Middleton, ASC, CSC, who also worked on Game of Thrones and The Killing, was the series DP. He just won the Emmy for Best Cinematography for a Limited Series or Movie for the episode “This Extraordinary Being.”

• Editing the Emmy-Nominated Mrs. America
• Ramy Youssef: Emmy-Nominated Director on Breakthrough Show
• Editing the Emmy-Nominated Drama Ozark

 … Continue Reading

Welcome to IBC Season 2020. While there is no physical IBC show in Amsterdam this year, many companies are still introducing new tools and promoting product updates and initiatives. In order to report on that news, postPerspective has brought the “virtual” show to you via Zoom interviews with post pros and those who make the gear they use.

In addition to our video interviews, we are also hosting a “Show Floor” section on our site, which includes Virtual Product Demos and Product Pro Chats. Check it out.

We hope you enjoy all our coverage of new technology, upcoming products, user thoughts and industry trends. We can’t all be together in Amsterdam, but this is our way of keeping our community connected.

This is the first of two video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos, please click here to see our full archive.… Continue Reading

Star Trek: The Next Generation is back! Well, sort of. The CBS All Access series, Star Trek: Picard, features Patrick Stewart reprising his role as the beloved Starfleet captain, Jean-Luc Picard. The 10-episode first season revisits Picard 20 years after Star Trek: Nemesis and features familiar Next Generation characters. The series features an incredibly fluid sonic world, with ever-evolving effects weaving in and out of crisp dialogue and a lush score. In fact, both the sound editing and sound mixing teams, working out of Warner Bros., were nominated for Emmys for their work. Re-recording mixer Todd Grace, CAS, and sound editors Harry Cohen and Tim Farrell were kind enough to share the workflow behind this sci-fi soundtrack.

• The Morning Show EP and Director Mimi Leder
• Posting Netflix’s Dark Desire: Color, DP, Editor, Workflow
• HP Unveils Updates to Its Z Portfolio

 … Continue Reading

When a young boy goes missing in the quiet town of Hawkins, Indiana, his family must join with local law enforcement and the community to search for answers. What follows is a series of strange happenings involving supernatural forces, secret government agencies and mysterious new r esidents. The incredibly popular Stranger Things is a sci-fi thriller from the Duffer Brothers and Netflix, and all three seasons are now streaming.Sound supervisor, sound designer and re-recording mixer Craig Henighan has worked on all three seasons of Stranger Things. He won Emmy awards for his work on the first two seasons and is nominated for his work on Season 3.

• Insecure Editor Nena Erb, ACE
• Behind the Title: Roof Creative Director Vinicius Costa
• Woman-Owned Licensor DA Music Launches Hits Catalog

Welcome to SIGGRAPH Season 2020. While there is no physical SIGGRAPH show in Washington, DC this year, many companies were already prepared to introduce and sell new tools. In order to report on that news, postPerspective has brought the show to you via Zoom interviews with visual effects artists and those who make the gear they use. In addition to our video interviews, we are also hosting a “Show Floor” section on our site, which includes Virtual Product Demos and Product Pro Chats. Check it out.… Continue Reading

If you watched the Apple TV+ series The Morning Show and believed the New York City scenes were shot in the Big Apple, that makes co-producer and visual effects supervisor Marc Côté very happy. In fact, the vast majority of the show was shot in Los Angeles, accounting for a big chunk of the 3,300-plus visual effects in the first season. “That was the goal from the beginning,” says Côté, “to give the impression that everything was completely done in New York.” For those of you who haven’t seen the series, it follows a Today-like morning show whose male co-host (Steve Carell as Mitch) is embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal.

• Greyhound’s DP and Colorist Talk Look
• Behind the Title: World Famous’ ECD Daniel Brown
• Goldcrest posts indie film She Dies Tomorrow

Tom Hanks enjoys telling stories about World War II. After his Oscar-nominated role in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Hanks — together with his producing partner Gary Goetzman and Spielberg — produced Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Hanks’ latest World War II project is the naval thriller Greyhound. Set against the backdrop of the Battle of the Atlantic, the film stars Hanks as Ernest Krause, a longtime US Navy officer with no combat experience who finally receives his first command: leading the destroyer Keeling (code-named Greyhound) and three other escort ships to protect a convoy of 37 merchant vessels carrying supplies and troops to England.

• The Sonic Language of HBO’s The Outsider
• Review: Boris FX Mocha Pro and Silhouette
• Behind the Title: Cut+Run Editor Jay Nelson

When Jeff Buchanan, ACE, and Zoe Schack began work on Beastie Boys Story, the “documentary experience” for Apple TV +, the two editors were already intimately familiar with the project. Before the documentary, there was a stage show. Before the stage show, there was a book tour. Along the way, surviving Beastie Boys members Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) had been working with their good friend, Oscar-winning director Spike Jonze. Jonze, who co-wrote and directed Beastie Boys Story, also directed the band’s 1994 music video for “Sabotage.” So when Diamond and Horovitz were planning a book tour before their memoir, “Beastie Boys Book,” was published, they asked Jonze who they could get to create some photo and video montages to display behind them as they were reading. He recommended Buchanan, whose editing credits include Jonze’s Her.

• Review: Wacom One Creative Pen Display — a.k.a. ‘Cintiq Light’
• Colorist

We’ve been hearing a lot about studios leveraging “the cloud” for post work, some embracing it and others approaching it warily. But when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, post facilities around the globe had no choice but to go all-in when it came to remote workflows through cloud networking. Don’t miss our Cloud Update 2020 Special Edition Newsletter, covering the following enlightening articles and video:

• Evolution and Necessity — Leveraging the Cloud for Post
• Turning to the Cloud for Editing and Producing
• Video: Cloud Workflow Glossary
• Virtual Roundtable: The Cloud for M&E
• ILM and Stargate on VFX and Private Clouds

In a period when issues of diversity and social change are at the forefront of society’s collective conversation, the award-winning series This Is Us has proved to be very timely. Created by Dan Fogelman, this NBC show chronicles the Pearson family across the decades: from Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and Jack’s (Milo Ventimiglia) courtship in the 1970s to their children — Kevin, Kate and Randall — searching for love and fulfillment in the present day. Fogelman’s TV credits include The Neighbors, Pitch and Like Family, and he’s written film screenplays for Pixar’s Cars and Disney’s Bolt and Tangled.

• Creating visual effects form Netflix’s Altered Carbon
• Behind the Title: Two Fresh’s creative director Phil Guthrie
• Framestore uses varied animation styles on new ads

When the coronavirus forced just about everything to shut down in mid-March, many broadcast television series had no choice but to make their last-shot episodes their season finales. Others got creative. While NBC’s The Blacklist opted for a CG/live-action hybrid to end its season, CBS’ courtroom drama, All Rise, chose to address the shutdown head-on with a show that was shot remotely. When CBS/Warner Bros. shut down production on All Rise, EPs Michael M. Robin and Len Goldstein — along with EP/co-showrunners Greg Spottiswood and Dee Harris-Lawrence — began brainstorming the idea of creating an episode that reflected the current pandemic crisis applied to the justice system.

• Colorist and DP collaboration on HBO’s I Know This Much is True
• DP Chat: James Whitaker on Amazon’s Troop Zero
  Getting creative to shoot, post sausage spot during COVID

The ‘70s in America was a lot of things, but boring wasn’t one of them. There was the on-going war in Vietnam; there were widespread protests against that war; there was a major political scandal; and the feminist movement was in full swing. It’s also when Hulu’s Mrs. America, an FX Original Series, takes place. Mrs. America was cut by three editors working out of 16:9 Post in Sherman Oaks — Robert Komatsu, Emily Greene and Todd Downing. We recently spoke with Komatsu, who cut the pilot and two other episodes, about his workflow. We also spoke with Downing and Greene, who edited three episodes each as well.

• Tales From the Loop DP talks large-format and natural light
• Review: Dell UltraSharp monitors — 49-inch curved and 27-inch 4K
• Behind the Title: Trollbäck ECD Elliot Chaffer

One thing viewers learned from watching The Last Dance — ESPN’s 10-part documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls — is that Jordan might be the most competitive person on the planet. Even the slightest challenge led him to raise his game to new heights.  Jordan’s competitive nature may have rubbed off on Sim NY, the post facility that worked on the docuseries. Since they were only able to post the first three episodes at Sim before the COVID-19 shutdown, the post house had to manage a work-from-home plan in addition to dealing with an accelerated timeline that pushed up the deadline a full two months.

• The Blacklist mixes live-action and animation for season finale
• CO3 color grades Togo with an Autochrome look
• Invisible visual effects for Hulu’s Big Time Adolescence

Irish director Lenny Abrahamson first burst onto the international scene in 2015 with the harrowing drama Room, which picked up four Oscar nominations, including for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director. Abrahamson’s latest project is Hulu’s Normal People, based on Sally Rooney’s best-selling novel of the same name. The series tracks the passionate, tender, complicated relationship of Marianne and Connell from the end of their school days in a small town in the west of Ireland to their undergraduate years at Trinity College. At school, he’s a well-liked and popular sports hero, while she’s upper class, lonely, proud and intimidating. But when Connell comes to pick up his mother from her cleaning job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers — one they are determined to conceal.

• Video Chat: Posting Late Night With Seth Meyers from home
• How VFX house Phosphene has been working remotely

Foley artists normally produce sound effects by mimicking the action of characters on-screen. But for Universal’s new horror-thriller, The Invisible Man, the Alchemy Post sound team team faced the novel assignment of creating the patter of footsteps and swish of clothing for a character who cannot be seen. Directed by Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man centers on Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss), a Bay Area architect who is terrorized by her former boyfriend, Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a wealthy entrepreneur who develops a digital technology that makes him invisible. The film’s sound team was led by the LA-based duo of sound designer/supervising sound editor P.K. Hooker and re-recording mixer Will Files. Hooker and Files asked the Foley team at NY’s Alchemy Post Sound to create a huge assortment of sound effects for the film.

• Hecho Studios: Mobilizing talent and pipeline to keep working from home
• RuckSackNY: Branding,

Welcome to what we are calling NAB Season 2020. While there was no physical NAB Show in Vegas this year, many companies were already prepared to introduce and sell new tools. In order to report on that news, postPerspective has brought the show to you via Zoom interviews with post pros and those who make the gear they use.

In addition to our video interviews, we are also hosting a “Show Floor” section on our site, which includes Virtual Product Demos and Product Pro Chats. Check it out. We hope you enjoy all our coverage of new technology, upcoming products, user thoughts and industry trends. We can’t all be together in Vegas, but this is our way of keeping our community connected.

If you’d like to see more videos, please click here to see our full archive.… Continue Reading

With the COVID-19 crisis affecting all aspects of our industry, we’ve been talking to companies that have set up remote workflows to meet their clients’ needs. One of those studios is The Molecule, which has focused on creating visual effects for episodics and films since its inception in 2005. The Molecule artists are currently working on a variety of series including Dickinson, Little Voice, For Life and Billions. And on the feature side, there is Stillwater and Bliss. Previous notable projects include The Plot Against America, Fosse/Verdon and The Sinner. In order to keep these high-profile projects flowing, head of production Blaine Cone and IT manager Kevin Hopper worked together to create the studio’s work-from-home setup.

• Colorist Chat: Toby Tomkins on I Am Not Okay With This
• More words of wisdom from editor Jesse Averna, ACE
• COVID-19: The many ways our industry is stepping up

For 2020, National Geographic’s Cosmos returned with Possible Worlds, producer Ann Druyan’s reimagining of the house that Carl Sagan built. Through cutting-edge visuals combined with the inciteful narration of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the series aims to show audiences how brilliant the future could be… if we learn to better understand the natural phenomena of which we are a part. I recently spoke with King Soundworks’ supervising sound editor/founder Greg King and sound designer Jon Greasley about the show. We chatted about how they tackled the challenges of bringing the worlds of forests and bees to life in Episode 6, “The Search For Intelligent Life On Earth.”

• VFX turn back time for indie film Tuscaloosa
• Review: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 mobile workstation
• COVID-19: The many ways our industry is stepping up

If you have any sort of social media presence, it’s likely that you have seen Playing For Change’s The Weight video, featuring The Band’s Robbie Robertson, Ringo Starr, Lukas Nelson and musicians from all over the world. It’s amazing. he Weight was produced by Mark Johnson and Sebastian Robertson, Robbie’s son. It was a celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Band’s first studio album, Music From Big Pink, where the song “The Weight” first appeared. Raan Williams and Robin Moxey were also producers on the project. The Weight is beautifully shot and edited, featuring amazingly talented musicians, interesting locales and one of my favorite songs to sing along to. I reached out to Robertson and Johnson to talk through the production, post and audio post.

• Words of wisdom from editor Jesse Averna, ACE
• Emma DP Christopher Blauvelt talks looks and workflow
• COVID-19: How our industry is stepping up

Don’t miss our 2020 Workstations Update. This Special Edition Newsletter spotlights all things related to workstations and accessories in today’s workflow. Articles include:

• Workstations: Offline Editing Workflows
• Color Grading and Workstations
• Visual Effects and Workstations
• Workstations Roundtable
• My Top Five Ergonomic Workstation Accessories
• What Makes a Workstation?

Jojo Rabbit has had an impressive path to the big screen and beyond. Since it premiered at Toronto last year, this film went from festival favorite to Oscar darling. Helmed by New Zealander Taika Waititi, and infused with his trademark blend of comedy and pathos, it’s a World War II satire that follows Jojo, a lonely German boy, whose world view is turned upside down when he discovers his single mother is hiding a young Jewish girl in their attic. Aided only by his idiotic imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi), Jojo must confront his blind nationalism. The Oscar-winning adapted screenplay by Waititi, who brought a fresh perspective and impish humor to the usually dead-serious subject matter, is based upon the book “Caging Skies” by Christine Leunens.

• With NAB 2020 canceled, what’s next?
• Director Vincent Lin discusses colorful Seagram’s Escapes spot
• Review: Litra Pro’s Premium 3 Point Lighting Bundle

The Fox family film The Call of the Wild, based on the Jack London tale, tells the story of  a big-hearted dog named Buck who is stolen from his California home and transported to the Canadian Yukon during the Gold Rush. Director Chris Sanders called on the latest visual effects and animation technology to bring the animals in the film to life. Sanders’ behind-the-scenes crew included two-time Oscar–winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski; production designer Stefan Dechant; editors William Hoy, ACE, and David Heinz; composer John Powell; and visual effects supervisor Erik Nash. We spoke with Sanders, who has helmed the animated films Lilo & Stitch, The Croods and How to Train Your Dragon, about making the film, which features a ton of VFX.

• DP Chat: Carnival Row cinematographer Chris Seager
• Review: Loupedeck+ for Adobe’s Creative Cloud — a year later
• Quick Chat: Editing Leap Day short for Stella Artois

Just Mercy is the latest film from award-winning filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote. The film is based on famed lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson’s memoir, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” which details his crusade to defend, among others, wrongly accused prisoners on death row. This Warner Bros. film stars Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Brie Larson. Cretton’s behind-the-scenes creative team included DP Brett Pawlak, editor Nat Sanders and composer Joel P. West, all of whom previously collaborated with the director on The Glass Castle.

• DP Chat: Cinematographer Greg Middleton on HBO’s Watchmen
• Review: GoPro’s Hero 8 and Max 360 cameras
• Colorist Chat: Nice Shoes artist Maria Carretero

Noah Baumbach first made a name for himself with The Squid and the Whale, his 2005 semi-autobiographical, bittersweet story about his childhood and his parents’ divorce. It launched his career, scoring him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. His latest film, Marriage Story, is also about the disintegration of a marriage — and the ugly mechanics of divorce. Detailed and emotionally complex, the film stars Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver as the doomed couple.

• Sundance Videos: Editor to Editor
• The Wizard of Oz gets 4K HDR restoration via MPI
• An online editor’s first time at Sundance

Sam Mendes’ 1917 tells the harrowing story of Lance Corporals Will Schofield and Tom Blake, following the two young British soldiers on their perilous trek across no man’s land to deliver lifesaving orders to the Second Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment. The production went to great lengths to create an immersive experience, placing the viewer alongside the protagonists in a painstakingly recreated world, woven together seamlessly, with no obvious cuts. We checked in with supervising sound editor Oliver Tarney and ADR/dialogue supervisor Rachael Tate, who worked out of London’s Shepperton Studios.

• Joker director Todd Phillips
• Jojo Rabbit editor Tom Eagles
• Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood editor Fred Raskin

Filmmaker James Mangold has been screenwriting, producing and directing for years. He has made films about cops (Cop Land), country legends (Walk the Line), cowboys (3:10 to Yuma) and superheroes (The Wolverine, Logan), and he’s tackled mental illness (Girl Interrupted) as well. Now he has turned his attention to race car drivers and Formula 1 with Twentieth Century Fox’s Ford v Ferrari, which has earned  Mangold an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The film also received nods for its editing, sound editing and sound mixing.

• Rob Legato on The Lion King‘s Oscar-nominated VFX
• Adobe Premiere Productions: collaborative film workflows
• Review: FilmConvert’s Nitrate
• Quick Chat: Franki Ashiruka of Kenya’s Africa Post Office

Filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie had been on the verge of the big-time since they started making their own distinctive brand of cinema: one full of anxiety, brashness, untamed egos and sweaty palms. They’ve finally done it with A24’s Uncut Gems. Following their cinema verité Heaven Knows What — with its look at the New York City heroin subculture — and the crime thriller Good Time, the Safdies return to the mean streets of New York with their latest, Uncut Gems. The film is a twisty, tense tale that explores the tragic sway of fortune, family and fate.

• Maryanne Brandon’s path, editing Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
• Behind the Title: Film Editor Edward Line
• The Two Popes recreates Vatican, Sistine Chapel

We take a look back at some of our best cinematography and color grading stories from 2019. We hope you enjoy the coverage!

• DP Marshall Adams talks El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
• Cinematographer Matthew Clark on shooting the film Late Night
• Light Iron colorist Corinne Bogdanowicz
• Colorist Scott Ostrowsky on Amazon’s Sneaky Pete
• Harbor crafts color and sound for The Lighthouse

If you are of a certain age, the red cardigan, the cozy living room and the comfy sneakers can only mean one thing — Mister Rogers! Sony Pictures’ new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, is a story of kindness triumphing over cynicism. It stars Tom Hanks and is based on the real-life friendship between Fred Rogers and journalist Tom Junod. In the film, jaded writer Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), whose character is loosely based on Junod, is assigned a profile of Rogers. Over the course of his assignment, he overcomes his skepticism, learning about empathy, kindness and decency from America’s most beloved neighbor. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is helmed by Marielle Heller, who most recently directed the film Can You Ever Forgive Me? and whose feature directorial debut was 2015’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

• DP Chat: The Morning Show cinematographer Michael Grady
• Talking audio post trends with NYC’s Wave Studios
• Skywalker Sound, Cinnafilm

At nearly every phase of the content creation process, storage is at the center. In this piece, we take a look at two post facilities whose projects continually push boundaries in terms of data, but through it all, their storage solutions remain fast and reliable. Light Iron juggles an average of 20 to 40 data-intensive projects at a time and must have a robust storage solution to handle its ever-growing work. And Final Frame recently took on a project whose storage requirements were literally out of this world.

• Storage for Visual Effects
• Storage for Editors
• Storage Roundtable

Writer/director Robert Eggers burst onto the scene when his feature film debut, The Witch, won the Directing Award in the US Dramatic category at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. He followed up that success by co-writing and directing another supernatural, hallucinatory horror film, The Lighthouse, which is set in the maritime world of the late 19th century. The story begins when two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) arrive on a remote island off the coast of New England for their monthlong stay. But that stay gets extended as they’re trapped and isolated due to a seemingly never-ending storm. Soon, the two men engage in an escalating battle of wills, as tensions boil over and mysterious forces (which may or may not be real) loom all around.

• Review: Acer ConceptD 7 laptop with Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU
• Behind the Title: Logan & Sons director Tom Schlagkamp
• Color grading Mister Rogers biopic via Deluxe New York

Director Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse tells the tale of two lighthouse keepers, Thomas Wake and Ephraim Winslow, who lose their minds while isolated on a small island, battered by storms, plagued
by seagulls and haunted by supernatural forces/delusion-inducing conditions. The Lighthouse is a tense and haunting slow descent into madness. But “unlike most films where the crazy ramps up, reaching a fever pitch and then subsiding or resolving, in The Lighthouse the crazy ramps up to a fever pitch and then stays there for the next hour,” explains Emmy-winning supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Damian Volpe. “It’s like you’re stuck with them, they’re stuck with each other, and we’re all stuck on this rock in the middle of the ocean with no escape.”

• Filmmaker Hasraf “HaZ” Dulull talks masterclass on sci-fi filmmaking
• VIDEO: SMPTE 2019 Live — Gala Honoree Interviews
• Behind the Title: Sarofsky EP Steven Anderson

He said he’d be back, and he meant it. Thirty-five years after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bad guy from the future first arrived to menace the world in the 1984 classic The Terminator, he’s back as the implacable killing machine in Terminator: Dark Fate, the latest installment of the franchise. And he’s not alone in his return. Terminator: Dark Fate also reunites the film’s producer/co-writer James Cameron with original franchise star Linda Hamilton for the first time in 28 years. The movie picks up where Terminator 2: Judgment Day left off. To helm all the on-screen mayhem, black humor and visual effects, Cameron handpicked Tim Miller, whose credits include the global blockbuster Deadpool.

• Review: Lenovo Yoga A940 all-in-one workstation
• Colorist Chat: Light Iron’s Corinne Bogdanowicz
• Behind the Title: C&I Studios’ Joshua Miller

The grit of Gotham City in Warner Bros.’ Joker is painted on in layers, but not in broad strokes of sound. Distinct details are meticulously placed around the Dolby Atmos surround field, creating a soundtrack that is full but not crowded and muddy — it’s alive and clear. “It’s critical to try to create a real-feeling world so Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) is that much more real, and it puts the audience in a place with him,” says re-recording mixer Tom Ozanich, who mixed alongside Dean Zupancic at Warner Bros. Sound in Burbank on Dub Stage 9.

• DP Chat: Marshall Adams talks El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
• Color grading the Empire State Building’s immersive exhibits
• Bernie Su: Creator of Twitch’s live and interactive show, Artificial

Ang Lee has always pushed the boundaries in cinema, both technically and creatively. The film Life of Pi, which he directed and produced, won four Oscars: Best Direction, Best Visual Effects, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score. Lee’s Brokeback Mountain won three Oscars and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was nominated for 10 and won four. His latest, Paramount’s Gemini Man, is another innovative film, this time disguised as an action-thriller. It stars Will Smith in two roles — first, as Henry Brogan, a former Special Forces sniper-turned-assassin for a clandestine government organization; and second (with the assistance of groundbreaking visual effects) as “Junior,” a cloned younger version of himself with peerless fighting skills who is suddenly targeting him in a global chase. The chase takes them from the estuaries of Georgia to the streets of Cartagena and Budapest.… Continue Reading

At IBC 2019, postPerspective TV shot interviews around the show floor in an effort to deliver IBC to those who couldn’t make the trip to Amsterdam and to those who were at the show but couldn’t see it all.

We hope you enjoy our extensive coverage of new technology, upcoming products and industry trends. It will be time well spent.

This is the second of two video newsletters you will receive from us. If you’d like to see more videos, please click here to see our full archive!… Continue Reading

IBC 2019 kicked off with an announcement from Avid — they were entering into a strategic alliance with Microsoft and Walt Disney Studios’ Studio Lab to enable remote editorial workflows in the cloud. The interesting part for me is how this affects the perception of post producing in the cloud, rather than the actual technology of it. It has been technically possible to edit remotely in the cloud for some time, either by navigating the Wild West interfaces of the principal cloud providers and “spinning up” a remote computer, connecting some storage and content, and then running an edit app. Or, alternatively, by using a product that takes care of all that such as Blackbird. No doubt, the collaboration with Disney will produce products and services within an ecosystem that makes the technical use of the cloud invisible.

• An editor’s recap of EditFestLA
• Behind the Title: Chapeau’s CD Lauren Mayer-Beug

We take a deep dive into short-form, episodic and feature film VFX workflows in this latest special edition of postPerspective.

• Visual Effects in Commercials: Chantix, Verizon
• Randi Altman’s VFX Roundtable
• VFX in Series: The Man in the High Castle, Westworld
• Tips from a Flame artist
• Maverick’s VFX for Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is marketed in a style similar to its predecessors — “the ninth film from Quentin Tarantino.” It is also the third film with Fred Raskin, ACE, as Tarantino’s editor. Having previously edited Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight, as well as having worked as assistant editor on the Kill Bill films, Raskin has had the opportunity to work with with a filmmaker who has always made it clear how much he values collaboration. On top of this remarkable director/editor relationship, Raskin has also lent his editing hand to a slew of other incredibly popular films, including three entries in the Fast & Furious saga and both Guardians of the Galaxy films. I had the chance to talk with him about his start, his transition to editor and his work on Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

• Dialects, guns and Atmos mixing: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan
• The sounds of HBO’s Divorce: Keeping it real
• Building a massive editing storage setup on a budget

Netflix’s Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW) are back in the ring for a third round of the dramatic comedy, but this time they’re in Las Vegas. The glitz and glamour of Sin City seem tailor-made for the 1980s-set GLOW and provided the main creative challenge for Season 3 cinematographer Chris Teague (Russian Doll, Broad City). “Early on, I met with Christian Sprenger, who shot the first season and designed the initial look,” says Teague, who was recently nominated for an Emmy for his work on Russian Doll. “We still want GLOW to feel like GLOW, but the story and character arc of Season 3, as well as the new setting, led us to build on the look and evolve elements like lighting and dynamic range.”

• Goosing the sound for Allstate’s action-packed ‘Mayhem’ spots
• Review: iZotope’s Neutron 3 Advanced with Mix Assistant
• Behind the Title: MPC Senior Compositor Ruairi Twohig

The TV landscape is full of scripted police procedurals and true crime dramas these days, but the legendary king of that crowded landscape is Emmy-winning creator/producer Dick Wolf, whose name has become synonymous with high-quality episodic drama. Since it burst onto the scene back in 1990, his Law & Order show has spawned six dramas and four international spinoffs, while his “Chicago” franchise gave birth to another four series —  Chicago Med, Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. His Chicago Justice was cancelled after one season. Then there’s his “FBI” shows, as well as the more documentary-style Cold Justice. I spoke with Emmy-winning Arthur Forney, executive producer of all Wolf Entertainment’s scripted series (he’s also directed many episodes), about posting those shows. 

• Review: LaCie mobile, high speed 1TB SSD
• Quick Chat: Bonfire Labs’ Mary Mathaisell
• An artist’s view of SIGGRAPH 2019

Pixar’s first feature-length film, 1995’s Toy Story, was a game-changer for animated movies. There was no going back after that film blasted onto screens and into the hearts of millions. Fast-forward 24 years to the franchise’s fourth installment — Toy Story 4 — and it’s plain to see that Pixar’s approach to animated fare hasn’t changed.Visually, Toy Story 4 brings so much to the screen, with its near-photorealistic imagery, interesting camera angles and variations in depth of field. “It’s a cartoon, but not really. It’s a film,” says Skywalker Sound’s Oscar-winning re-recording mixer Michael Semanick, who handled the effects/music alongside re-recording mixer Nathan Nance on dialogue/Foley. Here, Semanick and Nance talk about their approach to mixing Toy Story 4 and how they used reverb and Foley to bring the characters to life and the Dolby Atmos surround field to make the animated world feel immersive. They also talk about mixing… Continue Reading

HBO’s award-winning series Deadwood might have aired its final episode 13 years ago, but it’s recently found new life as a movie. Set in 1889 — a decade after the series finale — Deadwood: The Movie picks up the threads of many of the main characters’ stories and weaves them together as the town of Deadwood celebrates the statehood of South Dakota. The film, which aired on HBO and is available on Amazon, picked up three 2019 Emmy nominations in the categories of sound editing, sound mixing and best television movie. . The film’s cast is populated by returning members, as is much of the crew. On the sound side, there is freelance production sound mixer Geoffrey Patterson; 424 Post’s sound designer, Benjamin Cook; NBCUniversal StudioPost’s re-recording mixer, William Freesh; and Mind Meld Arts’ music editor, Micha Liberman.

• Colorist Chat: Refinery’s Kyle Stroebel
• Review: HitFilm Pro 12 for editing, compositing, VFX
• Meet the Artist: The Mill’s

You don’t have to get very far into watching the Epix series Perpetual Grace to realize just how ominous this show feels. It begins with the opening shots, and by the time you’ve spent a few minutes with the dark, mysterious characters who populate this world — and gathered hints of the many schemes within schemes that perpetuate the story — the show’s tone is clear. With its black-and-white flashbacks and the occasional, gritty flash-forwards, Perpetual Grace gets pretty dark, and the action goes in directions you won’t see coming. The series comes from the minds of executive producer Steve Conrad, who also served in that role on Amazon’s quirky drama Patriot, and Bruce Terris, who was both a writer and a first AD on that show. These showrunners developed the look with other Patriot veterans: cinematographers James Whitaker and Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, who incorporated colorist Sean Coleman’s input before commencing principal photography… Continue Reading

We take a deep dive into short-form, episodic, feature and documentary editing in this latest special edition of postPerspective.

• Editing for Short Form
• Editing for Episodics
• Editing for Features and Documentaries
• Editing Roundtable
• Emily Cohn on editing her own film, CRSHD
• Tips for inside — and outside — the edit suite

 … Continue Reading

The past year has been huge for British director Dexter Fletcher. He was instrumental in getting Bohemian Rhapsodyover the finish line when he was brought in to direct the latter part of the production after Bryan Singer was fired. The result? A $903 million global smash that Hollywood never saw coming. Now he’s back with Rocketman, another film about another legendary performer and musician, Elton John. The Freddie Mercury film was more of a conventional biopic that opted for a PG-13 rating and an approach that sidestepped a lot of the darker elements of the singer’s life. By comparison, Rocketman fully embraces its R-rating and dives headfirst into the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll circus that was Elton’s life at the time.

• Quick Chat: Sinking Ship Entertainment’s Matt Bishop
• EIPMA: Focusing on industry mentoring
• Remembering ARRI’s Franz Wieser

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off on Monday with a keynote from Apple CEO Tim Cook, where he announced the eagerly awaited new Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR. In recent years, many working in M&E felt as if Apple had moved away from supporting creative pros working in this industry. There was the fumbled rollout of FCPX and then the “trash can” MacPro with its limited upgrade path. Well, our patience has finally paid off and our faith in Apple restored. This week Apple delivered products beyond expectation. This post pro, for one, is very happy that Apple is back making serious hardware for creative professionals. The tight integration of hardware and software, along with Apple’s build quality, makes its products unique in the market. There is confidence and freedom using Macs that creatives love, and the tower footprint is back!

• Whiskey Cavalier DPs weigh in on the show’s look and DITs
• DP Chat: Brandon Trost on the Ted Bundy film 

In any film, or web/television series for that matter, the final presentation is the culmination of many choices — the director’s, the scriptwriter’s, the editor’s… just about everyone’s but the viewers. However, Netflix changed that with Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, a special interactive TV movie during which viewers are prompted to make selections that affect the decision-making and, ultimately, determine the fate of the main character, a young video game programmer. Alas, while the viewer is tasked with making certain decisions at various intervals in the movie, that certainly did not mean the workload was any less for those on the

• Catching up with Glassworks’ Duncan Malcolm, Flame Award winner
• Review: Polaroid 320 RGB LED light
• Behind the Title: Editor and Colorist Grace Novak

Idris Elba has always excelled at playing uber-cool, uber-controlled characters — often villains and troubled souls, such as drug lord Stringer Bell on HBO’s The Wire, detective John Luther on the BBC’s Luther, and the warlord in the harrowing feature film Beasts of No Nation. The star also moonlights as a DJ, which is the inspiration for his new Netflix show Turn Up Charlie. Elba stars as the titular Charlie, a decidedly uncool, struggling DJ and eternal bachelor, who finally gets a shot at success when he reluctantly becomes a “manny” to his famous best friend’s problem-child daughter. The show also serves as a showcase for Elba’s self-described “nerdy” side behind the camera, his love of producing and his hands-on involvement in every aspect of post. The eight-part series is co-produced by Elba’s Green Door Pictures and Gary Reich’s Brown Eyed Boy Productions, with Elba and Reich serving as executive producers alongside Tristram Shapeero,… Continue Reading

At NAB 2019, postPerspective TV shot interviews at our booth and around the show floor, all in an effort to deliver NAB to those who couldn’t make the trip to Vegas and to those who were at the show but couldn’t see it all.

We hope you enjoy our extensive coverage of new technology, upcoming products and industry trends. It will be time well spent.

This is the last of our three NAB 2019 video newsletters. If you’d like to see all of our NAB videos now, please click here to see our full archive!… Continue Reading