The Stars Shine At Chevrolet Film Night - Part Two

Ari Karpel: One of the things I’m always so curious about, is the experience for the actors in making a movie that’s so visual effect heavy. Because you always hear about green screen and you see shots you know of an actor playing with an imagined object against a bright green screen. How do you make a world like that feel real for an actor? I would love to ask Ian this as well.
Ian Bryce: Well you want to go John? Well it’s because we have two very different approaches just cinematically. Speaking from the Transformers standpoint and my good friend Michael Bay, and he has a love, and I do too of real environments and real life connections. So Michael’s approach as a director is to shoot whatever he needs in the real world and then enhance it with CG. And in the case of transformers, that’s much easier to do. And it was for Jon, in terms of performance because we can go shoot in the street and we can have cars and have real people and real explosions and then what you really have to add are the robots. So, you know there’s an ease, I think for Michael (Bay) you know to shoot that way.
With pre visualization, which he uses, you know he understands very well from the get go what the scene is ultimately going to look like and even when there’s nothing there when we’re shooting, he knows what it’s going to look like, so he knows how to frame and compose the camera for what’s eventually going to be added in post production.
Ari Karpel: And this is just to jump in, if I may to explain the pre visualization or previz as people call it, it’s the sophisticated version of storyboards, the sort of laying out what is all going to play out, because these movies are so sophisticated, now you got to out a lot of money into that even.
Ian Bryce: Sure, I think the other guys will concur. I mean depending on the kind of movie that you’re making, certainly for our films previz is essential. It’s essentially a high end cartoon if you will. You create the assets, let’s say the environment, you find the location and you recreate whatever portion of that you need in the previz and you add your characters, whether they’re humans or vehicles or robots in our case. And Mike (Reference: Michael Bay) can change the lenses, he can change the camera, he can move the camera within the environment once it’s created. It’s a great director’s tool, it’s a great marketing tool, frankly because once you have a good previz you can take it to the studio and the marketing department and they can understand, and very early before we’ve shot a frame of film, what they’re are going to end up with eventually. And it get’s them excited, and sometimes that can helps us with the budget and get us a little bit of money.
Rob Cohen: When you are directing actors in an unreal situation, green screen as so on, the job of the director becomes much more complicated because you have to find ways to create in the actor some genuine emotions in very artificial circumstances. So it’s more than showing them previz and timing and height and tennis balls and marks. You really have to work with them to somehow create a three dimensional experience that they’re are suppose to be having. So then they can reflect that back, so that when you do marry all the elements, it looks like they’re not doing the thousand mile stare in the 10 foot room, where they really don’t understand what they are looking at. So it’s an interesting thing where you move to another level of intensity, I find with actors when you are trying to get them to be real in such unreal places, as a mocap stage and so on.
Ian Bryce: It might be worth saying something about 3D jones being very humble, but I think the impact on the business for the rest of us post-Avatar. Was sort of a frenzy of activity. About OK, How do we sort of follow in the wake of what was done so successfully. And you know I remember talking to a very well known director a couple of weeks later. And he said, “It’s like how it was in the late 20s, when sound came along. And 3D has now done the same thing”, Mr. Spielberg and he said, “3D now has come along some sort of similar corner. As sound did back in the late 20s.” So the impact I think for the rest of us in the business, was how to chase that? How to try to become a part of that? How do you put that into your movies? Successfully, hopefully.
And you know, Jon is right. There’s lots of movies that just sort of went into 3D pipeline, maybe not as successfully as they might have. And yet it’s here to stay and the audiences love it. And so it is a part of our daily.
Jon Landau concluded the topic discussion by saying the movie Avatar suggests of a connective world, “we live in a connective world”. The more that we can make our product and our commerce for the whole, the more successful everybody will be.
continued from part one
www.4rfv.co.uk/industrynews.asp?id=153364
www.youngcreativechevrolet.eu