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passing around the video of Damon and Leno to one another with equal parts amusement and irritation.

“We, in fact, had just poured tons of CG into that shot. They worked their asses off on set, doing as much practical stuff as they could. But there was always stuff to be sweetened. It was like, You lying sack of shit. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

(When Defector reached out to Damon’s publicity team for comment, they said
the actor was currently out of the country filming and suggested we contact Mangold’s reps instead. As of right now, we have heard nothing else back from either camp.)

That same technician was invited to a special screening of Black Panther for visual effects artists. But when the Marvel rep, a white person, came out to introduce the film, “They were just so full of themselves. They were billing this as like the film equivalent of reparations. The disconnect was unbelievable. We were there to see our cohorts. But, as far as Marvel was concerned, they were on the leading edge of the civil rights movement. I just found it very discordant.”

A different sort of discordance inevitably ends up plaguing the end product.
In 2019, venerable director Martin Scorsese wrote an op-ed in The New York Times excoriating the film industry, Marvel in particular, for abandoning the craft of filmmaking entirely in favor of making what he called “perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption.” But now that you’ve heard from the artists and supervisors, you know that these are not, by any means, perfect products. Many of the people Defector spoke to for this story were proud of the work they’d done, on projects that included Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, The Walking Dead, and made-for-TV movies that air on The Hallmark Channel. Other times, they know the work Could Be Better. One project manager had to remaster all of Malcolm in the Middle, only to notice “ghosting”—where the image of an actor trails behind them for a split second—in the final product. Another artist worked on 2014’s 300: Rise of an Empire, which ended up
looking very much the way you would expect 300: Rise of an Empire to look.

“It was shot in Bulgaria or Romania. One of the two. [Note: It was Bulgaria.] These characters are on a green screen soundstage and they’re all on boats.
But the boats don’t move. There’s no ocean motion at all. We’re adding some really fake 2D rocking motion to every single shot, with everyone standing perfectly still on these boats. As if the ocean wasn’t moving. That stuff is
a giveaway. You know it was on a soundstage somewhere.”

There is some hope among below-the-line workers in Hollywood. Many of them
were allowed to work remotely full time in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and many studios and houses have been content to keep that setup ongoing. Also, this digitized phase of moviemaking may soon evolve into 100- percent virtual production, with green screens and blue screens permanently replaced by virtual sets: the kind used by Disney to produce The Mandalorian.

https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk

While The Mandalorian, like Ford v Ferrari, had more than its fair share of sweetening done in post, the virtual sets their production crew constructed using Unreal Engine—a technology first developed for gaming that has quickly been adopted by the film industry—not only helped the actors on set get into character, they also served as an advanced form of pre-visualization for workers on the back end, especially in terms of lighting. The result was an unqualified success, both creatively and financially, and the show serves as
a potential signpost for where postproduction is soon to be headed.

Producers and other C-suite denizens of Hollywood might be slow to embrace virtual production, but here is a place where effects houses can lead them, instead of the other way around. While one supervisor noted that close-ups on
a virtual set can be tricky, nearly everyone Defector spoke to about Unreal Engine and other virtual production tools is relatively bullish on their potential to make visuals cleaner while also making their lives easier. A supervisor told Defector that they guessed that 70 percent of virtual production shots on The Mandalorian still required touching up, but that
extra busywork could soon be drastically reduced.

“I think The Mandalorian sort of tricked the industry and said, Hey, look how possible this is, and then everybody started throwing money at it. But I
think in the next few years that percentage is going to be much lower. This
was ultimately the first proof of concept that this could be done in a series format.”

Of course, not every TV show in the future will serve as the launching point for a billion-dollar streaming service, using one of the most beloved sci-fi franchises of all time as its story base. But many people in post-production still see a future where virtual production allows them to meet expectations and to still tell human stories, without the job costing them their lives or their sanity.

For now, artists have adopted a strange mix of both healthy perspective and weary resignation. Many of our sources, as audience members, are unbothered
by shoddy effects work, so long as the story itself is “awesome,” as one
source put it. Others are more than happy to have low expectations, particularly when it comes to television shows, where bad effects were once both expected and accepted. The proliferation of bad effects can even bring a perverse sense of relief to these workers, because you can’t begin the
process of fixing a problem this pervasive and systemic until it’s been properly identified. It’s good if you see the flaws, if you understand that someone was there.

--
Let's go Brandon!

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