I'm only three questions in, but here's a terrific interview with 2049's editor:
https://www.provideocoalition.com/AOTC-Bladerunner-2049
Edit: reading on, there are some gems in there:
https://www.provideocoalition.com/AOTC-Bladerunner-2049
Edit: reading on, there are some gems in there:
Quote:
the three-some scene, there were no green screens, no elements. The actors would run the same shot twice with the same choreography. One complication from that was that you had two Ryan Goslings in the shot and two backgrounds of the apartment and you had to pick which to use. There was a lot of craft involved in finessing that. But the fundamental thing was that they could get instant gratification on set by seeing blended images and go "yeah, we got it". During the shoot, my cut used 50/50 blends and I did a few motion effects and picture-in-pictures position shifts to improve the actors' sync with each other. Then my temp team would roto everything in order to finesse it in Nuke.
Because of the difference in the actors' faces, if you matched the right eye up, the left eye would be out of register, making three eyes in all, a spidery quality. Denis chose to enable accidents. For two seconds Joi and Mariette's choreography will be identical and the next they'll be adrift, which creates a kind of ghost in the machine that we cherished. A fantastic accident I really loved I don't know whether Denis sees it as a failure or not but I certainly see it as an unexpected treasure was a moment where the two women walk behind K's back to take his coat off and he no longer has eye contact with them. That was one section where their body positions never sync'd well and despite every trick in the Effects palette I couldn't get a match. In the end, the VFX House D-Neg used an animated CGI Joi for that shot. It's subtle, but it feels like the program conserves energy when she's not being watched she defaults to something more robotic. A beautiful happy accident.