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Interview with ASC-winner Wally Pfister

In a surprise win, American director of photography Wally Pfister, who has been working with Chris Nolan for twelve years, ever since Memento, collected his first American Society of Cinematographers’ award for Inception Sunday. He beat out Oscar favorite Roger Deakins, who collected the BAFTA for True Grit on Sunday. Check out my flip cam interview with Pfister (below), who talks about working with Nolan; Pfister has received Oscar nominations for Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight and now, Inception, one of eight noms for the film.

I also covered a panel of Inception tech contributors, including from left in the photo above: sound mixers Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick, sound editor Richard King, visual effects masters Paul Franklin and Chris Corbould, production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, composer Hans Zimmer and Pfister. The movie won BAFTAs Sunday for visual effects, production design and sound, and looks likely to take home some tech Oscars on February 27.

The main reason Inception is so effective, gorgeous and believable is that it’s shot in anamorphic 35 mm (with some IMAX 65 mm sequences) on old-fashioned grainy color stock. They used no digital intermediate. That’s rare these days. This preserves brightness, contrast and clarity. That meant that the visual effects team had to use a photographic pipeline.

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VFX Breakdown of Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland presented a high degree of difficulty for veteran VFX master Ken Ralston and director Tim Burton, who tends to prefer live action FX to digital ones. He clearly wrestled with the huge volume of CG effects—the film used far more green screen than he’s ever dealt with. “It starts freaking you out after a while,” he said at Comic-Con, admitting that Alice in Wonderland was “the most difficult” movie he’s ever done. Burton insisted on avoiding motion-capture as much as possible (the effects team did mo-cap some actors, for reference). Burton wound up favoring “pure animation and using actors in mysterious ways,” he said.

Alice in Wonderland managed to score a final visual effects Oscar slot against intense competition this year. That’s because the VFX are all-pervasive throughout the film, and are used in ingenious ways to mix and match live-action footage, exacting exercises in shifting scale, and key animation. “It’s one of the most complicated things I have ever been involved with,” says Ralston, who is prepping Men in Black 3. “At first Burton was wary. But the great thing is, we hit if off. We didn’t dwell on the technical. We’d just get it done. He wanted real props there to give the actors something to work with. The hardest thing is the combination of creating a virtual world and adding action props so you believe that live actors are in that place. It’s complex, taking live actors who are talking to eccentric fantasy characters, to give a sense of relationship, to make them look like they are there.”

More exclusive details and how-they-did-it photos in the article.