With the ongoing fallout from COVID and strikes, and the mounting threats from streamers and AI, 2024 was another trying year for the business industry of Hollywood. And the recent catastrophic fires presented one more challenge, with many in the industry losing their homes and livelihoods. But Hollywood has always been resilient, the 97th Academy Awards are almost here, the nominations are in, and despite all the doom and gloom, 2024 turned out to be a great year for movies.
Leading the eclectic group of ten Best Picture contenders is the trailblazing Emilia Pérez, the most-nominated film of the year with 13 nominations, including a Best Actress nod for leading lady Karla Sofía Gascón, the first trans woman ever nominated in an acting category. Close behind with 10 nominations each are The Brutalist, the indie period epic about a visionary architect, directed by Brady Corbet (nominated for Best Director), and Wicked, the blockbuster musical. Also in contention are some more predictable Academy choices, ranging from the papal thriller Conclave to the sci-fi epic Dune: Part Two and the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, alongside some genuine surprises, such as the wild, over-the-top horror-gore French film The Substance, the farcical drama Anora about a stripper and Russian oligarchs, the harrowing and visionary period drama Nickel Boys about racist abuse at a ‘reform’ school, and the Brazilian, fact-based political drama I’m Still Here.
With all that in mind, we now present our annual look at some of the nominees.
BEST PICTURE/BEST DIRECTOR
At press time some of the leading contenders for the top awards have suddenly become mired in controversy, making the races more interesting and the winners far less predictable.
Frontrunner Emilia Pérez is doing damage control over its Best Actress nominee and star Gascón’s recently unearthed past inflammatory posts on social media, and French director Jacques Audiard’s musical-thriller about a trans Mexican drug lord-turned-philanthropist – which was largely shot near Paris, has been criticized in Mexico for its take on their culture, country and lack of Mexican talent in the production. Meanwhile, it emerged that AI was used to enhance Gascón’s vocals, that The Brutalist filmmakers used it to enhance the actors’ Hungarian pronunciation, among other things, and that I’m Still Here star and Best Actress nominee Fernanda Torres wore blackface in a Brazilian comedy sketch years ago — all hot-button issues, which may not sit well with some voters.
Director Edward Berger may have been snubbed in the Best Director category, but Conclave racked up eight nominations, including Best Picture, and the film, along with A Complete Unknown, Nickel Boys, Dune: Part Two, Anora and Wicked, may now seem like a safer, less controversial choice. Berger shot in Rome and as the Vatican does not allow filming, “the big challenge was to create one coherent impression that we are within the closed walls and quarters of the Vatican, and we obviously couldn’t build everything,” he reports. “We didn’t have the budget so we built the Casa Santa Marta and the Sistine Chapel at Cinecittà, and the rest is all locations. And to make that all feel like it’s one piece was a big puzzle to solve. The biggest visual effects were putting Rome into the far background, but that’s the easy stuff. The biggest part was the Sistine Chapel because obviously we didn’t build the whole thing. We built it up to seven meters high. Most of the fresco on the wall and on the sidewalls was even a bit lower, and everything else is digital extension.”
Conclave was also recognized for its skillful and effective editing by Nick Emerson, who edited at Goldcrest in London.
“He came to the set in Rome for a quick visit, but we basically worked remotely,” reports Berger. “Nick is such a great editor and knew exactly what I was thinking, and it worked really well remotely. The main editing challenge was mostly about eliminating stuff. The edit took about five months, and our first cut probably had five times as many cuts, and so it was a matter of just reducing that cut and realizing we could let shots hold longer. And then realizing that the longer you hold the shot, the better you could follow an actor’s emotion and his emotional transitions. I really wanted every shot to mean something and not to be repetitive.”
Berger, who says, “I love post and I’m very diligent post production person,” reports that “we did the mix at Abbey Road, and all the visual effects were done by UPP.”
Wicked, the first of a two-part film adaptation of the hit stage musical, reimagines the original Wizard of Oz, and instead focuses on the initial friendship — and then bitter rivalry — between two witches, Elphaba, who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and Galinda, who becomes Glinda the Good. Bringing that titanic struggle between good and evil to life, a battle both intimate and epic, was also a filmmaking experience that embraced extremes.
Director Jon M. Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks shot on the Alexa 65. To build their LUTs, Brooks worked with Company 3 and dailies colorist Lucie Barber.
“Finding the right dailies colorist is really important,” she stresses, “so she was incredibly instrumental to making this movie and creating the shooting LUT.”
The shoot was based at the newly-renovated Sky Studios Elstree outside London, and Brooks had 18 weeks of prep. Partly because of the strike, the shoot ultimately took over a year to complete.
“All the musical numbers and performances were shot live instead of being dubbed in post,” notes Brooks. “It’s demanding on the actors and on the crew because there’s only so many takes they can do, and you want to make sure everything’s technically perfect. Doing it all live was pretty incredible.”
Over 2,200 VFX shots were done by ILM and Framestore, and overseen by Oscar nominated VFX supervisor Pablo Helman. The final colorist was Company 3’s Jill Bogdanowicz.
A Complete Unknown from writer/director James Mangold stars Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan, and charts his 1961 arrival in New York, and subsequent early years as a gifted and ambitious singer-songwriter trying to find his place in the Greenwich Village folk club scene.
“We’re both traditional Hollywood filmmakers. We’re not doing our own interpretation of his life,” notes Mangold’s go-to, twice Oscar-nominated cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. “This was a bit of a different process from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, our last film. We wanted to approach it with more emotional photography, with a bit of a rougher look. So, I shot with the Sony Venice 2 at 8.6K, the full sensor, so I had a very clean image, and I knew that I was going to add grain, as typically we emulate film, and I discovered that FotoKem does what they call a Shift DI, which means you still color correct film in the digital intermediate. And then we’re filming out to a negative stock 5203, and then we scan it back in and finalize the DI, and create the DCP off this negative. With LiveGrain you have various stocks that have been scanned in, and you can apply it to your digital look. And you can change opacity, change grain size, and you can manipulate and create a film feel. But this is the real thing. You’re actually going to film.”
The team shot for 62 days, all in New Jersey, except for The Chelsea Hotel exterior and the courthouse in downtown New York. Mangold cut the film with Academy Award-winning editor Andrew Buckland (Ford v Ferrari, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny) and Scott Morris (Ad Astra, Armageddon Time), who explain the workflow.
“For our editing setup we used Mega Grater Mac Pros running Mac OS 12.7.4 Monterey and Avid 2023.12.2. Our media was DNxHD SQ 24fps 2:39:1 aspect ratio. Dailies were processed on location in New Jersey by FotoKem, and for all the remote editing sessions with Jim, we used Evercast.”
All the live music performances were “a big challenge, because Tim and Monica Barbaro (who plays Joan Baez) were singing live, and cutting live music together presents challenges, especially when they’re covered with multi cameras,” reports Buckland. “You’re music editing as well as cutting the picture at the same time.”
Adds Morris, “I remember cutting those live performances, and every take is different. The tempo might be a little different where the lines fall. But unlike a traditional music scene, where you have click track, we didn’t have that. So, we’re creating our own rules as we go.”
The duo used a lot of temp sound, especially for sound effects, and collaborated with the Oscar nominated sound team of supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester, sound mixer Tod A. Maitland, supervising music editor Ted Caplan, and re-recording mixers Paul Massey and David Giammarco.
“Don was with us from the beginning of shooting, building sound environments for us, whether it be New York City, or crowd elements, to cut to,” notes Morris. “So it was fully designed. And we’re cutting it 5.1 right away. Jim likes to hear a pretty polished edit from when we’re just cutting scenes on Evercast.”
Nickel Boys, the first feature from director/co-writer RaMell Ross, was shot in “just 29 days, so it was quite challenging,” he reports. But post wasn’t a steep learning curve for the neophyte. “I’d only made an experimental documentary called Hale County This Morning, This Evening before this, which I edited, and we actually had the same sound designers and same composers on this. The edit was hard, but the post production process was just a different version of what I had done before.”
Ross worked with editor Nicholas Mansour and did the post at Harbor in New York.
“I think the edit was the hardest part of post because we wanted the film to feel like the edit, to feel like it was evolving in front of your eyes in a way in which you’re sort of walking around a corner and there’s always a new image or something that has to do with a sort of dream state,” he explains. “We did the sound and mix at Harbor, and I have a good working relationship with our re-recording mixers and supervising sound editors Tony Volante and Dan Timmons, who did Hale County This Morning, This Evening, and we had many conversations before we started filming. And when we filmed, we had mics in certain areas so that we were capturing room tones and the directionality of sound as it is coming from the camera, as it’s coming from the character. And so we went forth in post after that with trying to build some sort of bespoke version of sound as it relates to a point of view. And we mixed in Atmos in this sort of 3D sphere in which they could place sounds in the scene and have them have spatial and temporal relationships to each other. It really allowed us to, I think, approach the feeling of consciousness.”
Ross worked with Artery and VFX supervisor Yuval Levy for all the VFX, and the grade was done with colorist Alex Bickle at Color Corrective.
“We spent weeks looking at every frame and every scene, and trying to balance out the relationship between color, sensation, feeling and the needs of the moment,” he says. “It was way more meticulous than I could have ever imagined, so that was a big learning curve.”
Indie writer/director/editor/producer and auteur Sean Baker’s Anora scored six nominations, including those for Best Director and Best Film Editing.
“I try to wear my editing hat when I’m writing and when I’m actually shooting, but ultimately I know that a lot of stuff will be rewritten or ultimately determined in post,” he told me. “I know what I’m going for in terms of trying to strike a balance with my screenplay and actual production, but I also know that I won’t be able to strike that balance until I’m in post production. That’s where I’m ultimately finding the film. And in this case, it really depends on the scene, like with the whole opening, where we’re establishing the club in a night in the life of Annie. I was comfortable knowing that as long as I amassed enough footage, I’d be able to find stuff in post production, because it’s very documentary-style, and it’s supposed to. I wanted to approach the editing like I was a documentary editor seeing footage for the first time and just figuring out how to tell a story with what looks like documentary footage. Then other sections of the film are very tightly scripted, like the home invasion scene, and all the dialogue there was obviously on the page. There was a little bit of improv here and there, but it’s tightly scripted, and my duty as a director was to get proper coverage on that scene, so that I had a lot to work with in post. And post is where I make the film.”
Written and directed by French auteur Coralie Fargeat, The Substance may be the wildest and bloodiest movie of the year — and its Best Picture and Best Director nods took most people by surprise. Set in a retro dreamlike version of LA, it was all shot in France and posted in Paris.
“I have a kind of love-hate relationship with post because it’s one of the toughest moments of the process,” says Fargeat. “You’re very tired after a long shoot, so you’re nervous and fragile, but it’s where you have to stand strong with your intuitions and your decisions, because it’s also the moment where everyone is going to be tempted to go towards safer choices.”
Fargeat resisted the temptation, as evidenced by the gory birth sequence and the climactic bloodbath — just to name two shocking scenes.
“I like to cut the first assembly during the shooting by myself, so I have an overview of the film when I finish the shoot,” she explains. “I shoot in such a precise way I know exactly which shots I want to use. I was in a very visceral relationship with my dailies, with the sound, with the music, which I start working on from the start of editing. But later I also have the other editors working on other scenes, and then at some point when we’ve started to get into a deeper process of editing, we work together on an overview of the film.”
The visual effects supervisor was Bryan Jones, and two companies in France did all the VFX: Noid studio did all the 3D for the blob scenes, and all of the other visual effects were created by CGEV.
VISUAL EFFECTS & POST WORKFLOW
Dune: Part One won the Best Visual Effects Oscar in 2022 for its awesome depiction of giant sandworms, ornithopters and alien planets. For the sequel, director Denis Villeneuve (see my interview with him at postmagazine.com) reteamed with his longtime VFX supervisor Paul Lambert.
“Post was done in LA,” says Villeneuve. “We cut the movie at editor Joe Walker’s house and did sound mixing at Warner Bros. As for the VFX, we had vendors from everywhere in the world, including Dneg, Rodeo, Territory, Wylie, Select and others. That’s the nature of the beast, as these movies require a tremendous number of artists, and you need to have a strong VFX supervisor, who absolutely understands your vision, who will convey your ideas as best as possible. Paul Lambert is that guy and I’m very lucky to work with him. I don’t think I would be able to make any of my sci-fi movies without Paul.”
“We had 2,156 visual effects shots in the movie, and Dneg did most of the heavy lifting, like the worm-riding section,” reports Lambert. “Wylie actually had the most shots in the movie, as even a shot with the Fremen blue eyes becomes a VFX shot, and we had over 1,000 shots for just the eyes, and we used an algorithm and a new method for that. Then we had these huge battles and so on. I was on it for 22 months, from early prep until the end of the DI.”
Visual effects supervisor Erik Winquist, Paul Story and Stephen Unterfranz were honored for their work on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the latest and tenth installment, directed by Wes Ball (see my “Director’s Chair” column in the March/April 2024 issue). Weta did every VFX shot — “about 1,520 total,” says Winquist. “We touched all but 38 shots in the film, so virtually every shot has visual effects somewhere. The thing that’s interesting is that when you compare that 1,520 number to a big Marvel tent pole, or some of the bigger action films that are upwards of 3,000 shots, it really tells you how long the shots are and how we could hold them, and it’s not a short film. And Wes didn’t have to cut up the work. He could really let those performance moments between characters just exist in a space for a thousand frames or more, which is always really satisfying for me.”
Ultimately the film’s VFX alone took a crew of “over 1,000 people and 58 weeks of post,” he reports.
Oscar winning visual effects supervisor Eric Barba, and his team of Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser (ILM VFX supervisor), Daniel Macarin (Weta FX VFX supervisor) and Shane Mahan, were nominated for their work on Alien: Romulus, which has 1,400 VFX shots, including for such key scenes as the zero-gravity sequences.
“The biggest challenge initially was to figure out how we were going to shoot the zero-G sequences because those are incredibly challenging to shoot from the perspective of the actors, stunts, sets and camera,” Barba notes. “And then for me, it was trying to get the bodies to feel right and not rotating on rigs. So, there was a lot of planning and previs done for that, ultimately leading to four set builds — two vertical sets and two horizontal sets — so that we could editorially shoot between them and give the camera team and the actors the ability to not know which way gravity was up. And then in CG we would add lots of extensions and floating bits and pieces. It was a tricky thing for us, especially where it concerned the Xenomorph. We were using everything available to us to achieve the illusion — the vertically and horizontally-built sets, stunt rigs, CGI — basically, a combination of all viable techniques to make viewers feel like they are in zero-G.”
In terms of vendors, Barba reports that “ILM was our primary, initially, and was responsible for getting our CG Xenomorph going, and the Facehuggers. They also helped me set up the look of space. And then, as we only had less than year in post, we brought in Weta to help us, and they took on the third act with the offspring, as well as the space shots around the station going into the rings. Image Engine, Wylie and Atomic Arts all did smaller pieces to help us out.”
Framestore’s work on Wicked (see Post’s November/December “Cover Story”) was led by visual effects supervisor and creative director Jonathan Fawkner, a four-time Oscar nominee. Working closely with the film’s director, DOP, production designer and production VFX supervisor, Fawkner and his team helped to amplify the film’s sense of magic, working on epic environments and CG characters, like Doctor Dillamond (voiced by Peter Dinklage). Framestore’s work also encompassed concept art via its in-house art department, as well as previs and postvis courtesy of Framestore Pre-production Services (FPS).
Finally, apes may rule in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and Wicked features a ton of CG simians, but what about the solo starring monkey in Better Man? In bringing pop star Robbie Williams’ life and career to the screen, and knowing that a conventional biopic approach would never work for such a unique individual, director Michael Gracey had a brilliant and truly audacious conceit, inspired by the singer’s “referring to himself as a performing monkey,” he explains. “He also told me, ‘The moment you get famous is the moment you stop evolving.’ So I’m dealing with a character that’s ‘unevolved,’ who sees himself as a performing monkey, and I just thought, ‘If we show Robbie not as we see him, but how he sees himself, wouldn’t that be an interesting film?’ And if you’re doing a musical, you’re already in a heightened reality. So if he’s a monkey on top of that, you’re in a very heightened reality.”
To achieve this, Williams was digitally scanned and motion-captured by the team at Weta, led by VFX supervisor Luke Millar, while performing a song from the film so production could authentically reference his facial expressions, mannerisms and performance movements. Gracey then cast two actors to play the younger Robbie Williams, and another taking on the lead role of Williams as a teen and adult. After filming their respective performances via motion capture, Gracey and Weta fused all of these elements to create the monkey character and deliver what is arguably the most unusual VFX performance of any film this year.
And the winner is…stay tuned.