Made in Hollywood

"It is estimated that the nominee luncheon is also over."

At the break table in the editing room, Mike Dawson looked at the time and said to Anna Prinz, "I bet $100 that Duke won't be nominated for best director."

For an old-school Hollywood figure like Mike Dawson, getting a best director nomination for a superhero movie is simply out of the question.

But Anna Prinz didn't see it that way. She put down the coffee in her hand and said, "Okay, I'll put up $100. Duke will definitely be nominated for best director."

After draining the coffee in the cup, Duke glanced at the two people with boring eyes, "If you have nothing to do, go to the special effects studio to help."

Tina Fey, who was sitting next to Duke, laughed, "The results will come soon."

She seemed to have a tacit understanding with Tina Fey. Three minutes after she finished speaking, Nancy Josephson called, but after Tina Fey hung up the phone, an incredible expression appeared on her face, as if Transformers really appeared on Earth.

"What's the matter?" asked Anna Prinz.

"Don't you get the Best Supporting Actor nomination?" Mike Dawson immediately thought of another aspect.

Even Duke's eyes showed a bit of curiosity. Tina Fei was greatly influenced by him. Even if there were serious emergencies, this would not happen.

"The nomination list is out." Tina Fey put away her expression and said directly, "The Dark Knight won Best Supporting Actor, Best Sound Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Sound Effects. , Best Makeup, Best Editing, Best Visual Effects, and…”

She paused, then added, "And best director, nine nominations in total."

"No Best Picture?" demanded Mike Dawson.

Tina Fey shook her head. "No best picture nominations."

Duke and several others also showed expressions similar to Tina Fei just now.

Films nominated for Best Director. It is not unique in Oscar history, but it is extremely rare.

Several people glanced at each other, Duke sighed, "The academy is indeed a master of balance."

"Those people should be engaged in politics..." Anna Prinz couldn't help shaking her head, "instead of film awards."

Duke, after all, are veterans in the industry. After a little thinking, it is not difficult to find the intention of the academy. "The Dark Knight" has aroused extremely strong repercussions. The content of its discussion has been out of the scope of the film and spread to the real world. Coupled with Duke's strong appeal, if you ignore it directly If you drop it without giving an explanation, you will surely be attacked by countless media and fans.

And discrimination against superhero movies is a tradition at the academy. Of course the stubborn old men didn't want to break the tradition easily.

Giving Duke a best director nomination and ignoring The Dark Knight for best picture would comfort the press and fans while trying to maintain its own heritage.

On the other hand, Duke's own status and influence simply cannot be ignored. This can also give him an explanation.

"It's also a nomination." Duke told Tina Fey, "Inform Warners that the focus of publicity is still on Heath Ledger, and he must be guaranteed the best supporting actor."

If Heath Ledger was still alive. It will be infinitely harder for him to win Best Supporting Actor, but death often trumps the best PR.

Same thing. Duke is still alive, and living very well, it is impossible for the Academy to award his director to him because of "The Dark Knight".

Keeping Tina Fey's attention on The Dark Knight's Oscar progress, Duke's attention turned back to post-production on Transformers.

After finishing the first cut version. Duke began to fine-cut the film without special effects. The goal of fine-cutting was very clear, shortening the length of the film to less than two and a half hours, and making the whole rhythm more compact.

Strictly speaking, this is also a standard superhero movie, but unlike "Spider-Man" and the like, Duke will not let "Transformers" have a plot similar to Peter Parker and Mary Jane's melodious love song, Sam The relationship of adversity with Mikaela will also exceed the relationship between men and women, and this relationship is the same as the rhythm of the film, which is overwhelming from beginning to end.

This kind of fierce MTV-style high-speed editing is also known as the 'Duke Rosenberg style'.

In fact, no matter who makes the Transformers live-action movie, the protagonist in the protagonist is undoubtedly Transformers himself.

The alien machine life is transformed into an ordinary mechanical device to avoid the attention of ordinary people. Various transformations, from cars, planes, to robots with feet firmly on the ground, the picture is like a dream.

But if you want to be authentic, you need excellent special effects production. Duke has extremely high requirements for the industrial light and magic company responsible for special effects production, and the special effects pictures produced are repeatedly modified by them.

He wants the robots on the screen to come alive, whether those robots are hovering in the air, escaping under the sand, or running wild on the highway, as if they exist in the real world.

Robots are virtual, and the tanks and planes they are compared to are real, and this cannot be vague.

According to Duke's request, ILM's special effects engineers let the two use digital technology to form a special effect picture on the blue screen.

At the same time, the cooperation with the military is very crucial. There are many war scenes in the film. It is also the largest cooperation between the military and Hollywood in an action film in history. The sponsorship provided by the Pentagon allows the crew to save a lot of expenses, thus Makes more money invested in post-production.

In addition to the months spent on preparation, the film took only 75 days to shoot on location, and some shots also used IMAX3D cameras.

The scale of the production process of Transformers can be described as very large.

Although shooting was complete and post-production progressed smoothly, Duke did not let up in the slightest, and for a film like this, any oversight could have extremely serious consequences.

In order to coordinate the work between various departments in the post-production, he put a folder in the computer shared area, named it 'Clip Samples', and all colleagues involved in the production can browse freely.

Duke is well aware that film is a product of teamwork and that you can never get the desired picture without trying it out yourself.

The editing of the film is completely faithful to the style that Duke demanded, and in the cut-out clips, there are countless action scenes, countless appearances, lines, punch lines, visual effects one after another, and of course, countless fast-spinning scenes. The footage is almost breathless.

To a certain extent, whether it is editing or special effects production, it must be tempered, so that Duke can make the picture in his mind into a finished product through a tacit understanding of the team.

The special effects production department uses 6 video workstations and two massive memories, which are specially used to store all the footage and the corresponding preview effect sketches. In order to allow ILM and Duke to send the results of daily work to each other smoothly, they also specially built a multimedia network.

"Transformers" is very large, and editor Mike Dawson is very experienced and skilled, and he can fully understand Duke's ideas. He can always weave fast-paced fight scenes, incomparably complex special effects, and just the right little humor. into a gripping story.

In addition to the more than six hours of the original cut version, Duke still has dozens of hours of material, which are all alternative shots for the film.

A movie, no matter how it is shot, can never be copied and pasted. Besides, Duke has made so many changes. Since he entered the industry, the number of shots in which shot is not ten times or even two times the final editing. ten times as much.

From the preparatory period to the end of the shooting, Duke prepared a lot of material. After entering the post-production, sometimes the only purpose of the crew's work seems to be to find some shots that were not used, because he would also be dissatisfied with the editing results, and put them all together. kill.

Except for vacation days, Duke would go to the workplace every day, carefully try to figure out what he wanted, and then describe it to others.

He also sometimes wants to see the results of the editors first, let them cut their own work first, and then study and review it for an hour or two. Group shots are smooth and natural.

In this case, the action scenes of the film have undergone repeated editing, and Duke often has to deal with eighty to one hundred sets of shots a day, each of which must be taken seriously, and they are an important part of the film.

In order to complete the work efficiently, including Mike? Dawson, Duke used a total of six editors, but the other five were mainly Mike? Dawson.

Large scale and fast pace are the biggest characteristics of "Transformers", and there must be a competent editing team to constantly come up with useful new ideas.

Even so, many times the crew will face each other and be helpless. For a movie with such a large cost and a large production, if you want to process the finished footage with high quality and quantity, you need multiple editors to work together.

To get a feel for it, Duke watched the first few episodes of the 1984 cartoon repeatedly in his spare time, but he didn't intend to be too influenced, after all, a movie and an animated series are very different works.

And several editors, including Mike Dawson, are not fans of Transformers. Although it is easy to delete some clips that may be important to Transformers fans, on the other hand, it also makes The editing effect is easier for the general public to accept and avoids the movie being too fan-oriented.

The scale of this movie is very grand, the content of the original animated series is not suitable for porting into the movie at all, and Mike Dawson has not even seen the previous Transformers animated series and animated movies because he thinks it is necessary to make a '' A Duke Rosenberg-style movie 'doesn't help. (To be continued ~^~)

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