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Todd Vaziri: No shot is more important than the sequence. No sequence is more important than the movie.
Todd Vaziri: It's all in the service of the movie.
[Theme Music]
Rob Bredow: Welcome to the very first Lighter Darker podcast where we talk about the creative process of filmmaking and the art of visual storytelling. We share stories with the goal of entertaining and inspiring the next generation of visual storytellers to join our ranks. Thank you so much for joining us for this, our premiere episode.
Rob Bredow: This is episode one of Lighter Darker. This is the first of 20 that we have planned for our first year of the podcast. We're gonna be releasing every other Tuesday with a couple of holiday breaks. It's great to have the show underway after lots of planning. And thank you for being a part of our very first episode.
Rob Bredow: I'm here with my co host, Todd.
Todd Vaziri: Hey, I'm Todd Vaziri. I'm a compositing supervisor and artist at ILM.
Rob Bredow: And our producer, Jenny.
Jenny Ely: Hello. I'm Jenny Ely. I'm a production manager at ILM....
Rob Bredow: I'm Rob Bredow. I'm the Chief Creative [00:01:00] Officer of ILM and SVP of Creative Innovation at Lucasfilm. And we all work together at ILM in the visual effects, animation, and immersive entertainment industries. For today's show, we've got two major sections to talk about. First, our feature, which is, I'll explain what this is in just a minute, but it's one final and one CBB.
Rob Bredow: And then we're going to dive into our main topic for the day, which is I think Todd, your favorite topic to talk about, daily's culture. How to make great dailies.
Todd Vaziri: One of my favorites..
Rob Bredow: One of your favorites. we'll get into aspect ratios in a future episode. I don't know if that's your most favorite, but aspect ratio corner, I can't wait to visit on a future podcast. First let's dive into our main feature for today or our feature, which is uh, one final, one CBB. And well, what do we mean by final and CBB? these phrases that we've heard before. So final is we're going to pick one of our favorite shots that we're incredibly proud of. It's a final shot in the film, and we'll dive into some details about why we love it.
Rob Bredow: The CBB what is a CBB, Todd?
Todd Vaziri: CBB [00:02:00] is a classification of a shot. Let's put it this way, could be better. We've done the best we can, but we need to move on to finish other shots, to make sure we deliver the entire picture. This could be an internal CBB. This could be a client CBB. It basically means we almost got there and we know it could be better.
Rob Bredow: And we work on, you know, some of the biggest movies of our time here at ILM, but no matter what you have you have a timeframe, you've got a budget, you've got to get the movie in theaters and not every shot needs the exact same level of polish. So you do end up with some things that if you had infinite resources, you might go back and revisit.
Rob Bredow: Yeah. We've each picked one final and one CBB from movies that we loved and worked on. And this is in no way a shot of these movies. These movies are fantastic and really successful, but there's always stuff you could do better. So,Todd, what did you pick to think about for your final and your CBB?
Todd Vaziri: Well, I'm going to hang out with the gang from Starfleet for Star Trek Into Darkness. The shot that I'm proud of is one of the introductory [00:03:00] shots, of the Starship Enterprise for that movie, and it was a, it was in the prologue where the Enterprise was doing its classic thing of trying to save a civilization without the civilization knowing it, you know, don't want to violate the prime directive and all, of course to, to stay hidden.
Todd Vaziri: The Enterprise parked their ship in a very interesting place underwater. And they were doing their little mission to stop this volcano from erupting and destroying this alien civilization, but they had to do it in secret. We catch little glimpses of the Enterprise underwater and the shot that I got was the shot of the Enterprise actually rising out of the water and displacing tons and tons of water.
Todd Vaziri: But the camera actually starts with the over the shoulder of the aliens on the cliff side looking over the ocean. The camera goes past the aliens and through some foliage to reveal the Enterprise rising up, and you actually see very little of the Enterprise. You [00:04:00] mostly see water gushing
Rob Bredow: That's such a cool shot.
Todd Vaziri: It was a super fun shot.
Todd Vaziri: I could not believe Roger Guyette trusted me with it. I was very happy about that. I worked really closely with Lee Uren who did all of the water simulations and rendering. And Tom Fieges, who was in charge of the lighting of the Enterprise. And boy, getting that balance and scale right of the water was a real tricky challenge.
Todd Vaziri: And we just pumped so much detail into that water. Where if you watch the shot 10 times, you can hopefully look at 10 different spots and see some interesting things happening with how the water gushes off. Including- there's a big section of the water that trails over the nacelle and gets displaced because it's like the nacelle is on and it's firing some energy out and it's moving the water around.
Todd Vaziri: Really difficult composite and I'm really proud of it and yeah, I look back on it and I smile.
Rob Bredow: Yeah, that's, that's one of those memorable shots. When you think about the movie, that's [00:05:00] one of the shots that comes to mind, and actually there's still frames of it on ILM's wall. So they’re a constant reminder of the quality of the work that the team put into that one. That's a beautiful final.
Todd Vaziri: One, one design aspect I wanted to point out is that for the first movie Star Trek J. J. and Paul Kavanagh and Roger Guyette all came to this agreement to try to make the Enterprise feel large. You basically very rarely, it never, ever see the Enterprise fully enclosed in the frame. There's always bits of the Enterprise peeking across the edge of the frame as if it is so large, even our cameras can't handle it.
Todd Vaziri: And that shot of the water of the Enterprise coming out of the water, the tips of the Enterprise breaking frame to kind of subconsciously tell you, this is a really, really big ship. I just love how that stuff works.
Rob Bredow: Such a great compositional choice that the team made on that and it pays off in that [00:06:00] shot
Jenny Ely: I think you also did well with satisfying the VFX community and the nerd community of Star Trek fans because I know people in both of those camps and I have heard both sets of those people mention that exact shot. So I think that's pretty rare that you make the fans happy and you make VFX people happy, so well done.
Todd Vazari: The less you think about the physics of a spaceship, you know, hanging out underwater for days, weeks, who knows?, the Better.
Rob Bredow: For sure. Well, if it can handle the vacuum of space, but water is a little different. So that same show has a CBB on your list, Todd?
Todd Vaziri: It does. And this is, and it's a shot I'm still very proud of, but, knowing what I know now, I probably would have approached it slightly differently. This is a shot where, like I mentioned, they were the crew of the Enterprise trying to stop this volcano from erupting. So a shuttle craft actually has to go through a pyroclastic cloud.
Todd Vaziri: It's already started. And, the shot is the, as I was turned over the shot, a wall of pyroclastic clouds and [00:07:00] the shuttlecraft bursts through it, swings right around camera and parks, and that's where Spock is going to drop down and deliver a device. I wanted that moment of it coming through the pyroclastic cloud to be really epic.
Todd Vaziri: I mean, again, this is a shuttlecraft. It can't have the scale of the Enterprise. This is on a much, much smaller scale. But I wanted to have the rooster tails of, you know, the smoke getting displaced. I wanted to have the chaos, and it's supposed to be an extremely dangerous place, like you are in the middle of this cloud and you do not want to be there. So it has to be scary and full of dark ash, and you know visibility is very difficult.
Todd Vaziri: So I worked really really hard on that explosion moment and through the course of the shot and through the course of the edit, they decided because of moving some shots around that it was a better shot to start it after the shuttle had breached the, the cloud and in, it was [00:08:00] into the open area. And I'm still really proud of the shot.
Todd Vaziri: I really wish that I had known that and there's, but there's no way to know it. This is the creative process there. Everybody, we're always trying to find the best sequence, the best cutting, the best editing to really tell the story. And I don't blame anybody for anything, but had I known, I probably would have spent a little less time on that and probably a little more time on something else.
Rob Bredow: It's so interesting that, you know, the movie is evolving while these shots are coming together and figuring out the most important story elements. In that case, you had an idea what the most important or compelling visual storytelling element was going to be, but then it turned out that the sequence needed something else.
Todd Vaziri: Right, right. No shot is more important than the sequence. No sequence is more important than the movie. And even then, we work with visionary directors. We have directors, we previs like crazy, we post vis. They have their, some of them have their movie in their mind. The movie is constantly evolving.
Todd Vaziri: It's not done until it, until it's [00:09:00] done. So it's, you can get upset about something like that, but it's all in the service of the movie.
Todd Vaziri: What do you have for your final?
Rob Bredow: Yeah, I picked my finals and CBBs both from Solo: A Star Wars Story, which was such a fun movie to get to work on. I mean, I really got included by Ron Howard and before Ron the Chris and Phil in the core creative team on the show.
Rob Bredow: So I just had an amazing experience. I mean, not just because it was Star Wars and it was my first visual effects, supervising HOD job here at ILM. So, I mean, it was special for lots of reasons but especially because I got looped into that room where the film was getting made. So I just had so much fun on the film.
Rob Bredow: But I'm going to start with my CBB about seven and a half minutes into the movie, Alden and Amelia, you know, playing Han and Qi’ra, in the film have stolen this souped up speeder and are racing to get out of Corellia. [00:10:00] And this, to me, when I read the script, there was lots of complicated things in the movie, but this was probably the only thing that terrified me, or one of the things that terrified me about the movie when I read the script. Because it's a convertible speeder, which meant we were gonna have to pull off the illusion of the actors being in a moving car through all these different environments, some real, some synthetic, and we needed to make it very believable.
Rob Bredow: And Poor Man's Process, you know, shooting People on stage and then compositing them into environments. I mean, you see this all the time in car work, but it's not always that successful. And it's not that easy to do really well. It requires a close collaboration between the DP and well, really DP and visual effects working really hand in hand, designing these shots in advance.
Rob Bredow: So we knew this going into it. That was the opening action sequence of a Star Wars film. It had to be great. And the production invested. I mean, I'm so grateful we made full scale cars. We could drive around real locations. We scouted places, you know, far East of London, far West of London, went to all these different places to [00:11:00] shoot real stunts.
Rob Bredow: Dom Tuohy was a special effects coordinator. His team built these amazing race cars and then built a speeder on top of it. So the actors, the cast could actually get inside there. A stunt driver could be hidden on a pod on the other side, and race through real locations.
Rob Bredow: So we had real photography with the real actors and the real in the real speeder that we could stick in the film. So that was great. And all we had to do in some of those shots was like paint out the wheels and extend the backgrounds, make it completely Star Wars.
Rob Bredow: But we also needed to do some poor man's process because you can't shoot all the dialogue on location, the show evolves, lots of things, lots of good reasons to go and shoot someone on the stage and Bradford Young, who was the DP was a fantastic partner, such a collaborator on the show.
Rob Bredow: He was really thrilled to work with us. We did all these ratio studies. We actually he invested, we invested together in hanging some LEDs that he could use for lights. So LED walls, this was before we had ever done LEDs for StageCraft and before LEDs were fine [00:12:00] enough a pitch to be able to photograph them directly, but we were using them as a lighting source so you could move content along the LED walls and you get really interesting lighting on the actor's faces.
Rob Bredow: So big investment and it really paid off in almost every shot. There's one- about seven and a half minutes into the movie. It's very short. I think Amelia says something like “we're never gonna make it.” It's right before Han flips the speeder on the side and starts chasing down between like a Star Destroyer and some piece of equipment and actually gets a speeder stuck. There's one that just we could just not get working.
Rob Bredow: It was just so tricky and it ended up that the lighting that we needed for the moment where it got used in the film just didn't correspond quite right with the lighting that had been baked in from the production photography. And but there was no getting around it. I mean, there was no better performance from Amelia and Alden.
Rob Bredow: They gave a great performance. It was the moment we needed in the film. We needed to see it on Han's face. You could see Amelia's lips saying the words, so you couldn't change the sync. There were, there just wasn't a lot of flexibility. We didn't have a better [00:13:00] take. And fortunately the team working on that shot, I think it was up in our Vancouver studio and I know Pat Tubach was supervising it.
Rob Bredow: They were able to digitally relight the foreground elements to get it so much better integrated. And actually I was looking at the shot earlier today and it just stuck in my mind as my, like my CBB from the show. And it's actually pretty good. It plays really well. It's only like a second and a half long.
Rob Bredow: It plays pretty well, but it does stick in my mind as one of those that we didn't quite get all the pieces to come together, but, but it was still the right thing for the show. I mean, it was a moment you needed. So yeah, that's my Solo CBB.
Todd Vaziri: And that's the great thing about visual effects, is that you, you know, the minute you step on set, you can have the best plans in the world, but the moment you step on set, it's compromise city, and you do the best you can, and then you, you know, luckily we have a good team back at ILM that you knew you were going to take this to, and could just put it a little bit over the edge so that it would work well in the cut.
Todd Vaziri: I've seen the movie a few times, I still don't even know what shot you're talking about. I think it works really [00:14:00] well,
Rob Bredow: I’ll take it. I’ll take it.
Rob Bredow: My final from Solo would be the shot - there's a couple of them, but the one that I love the most is that first reveal shot. At the beginning of the Kessel Run, there's a Star Destroyer that is blocking the way out of the Kessel Run the Imperial, the beginning of the Imperial blockade.
Rob Bredow: And this is a shot I love for a bunch of reasons. One of the art directors on the show was James Clyne, who's amazingly talented. He worked closely with Brett Northcutt on this amazing concept painting.
Rob Bredow: And to set the stage like, you know, the way.
Rob Bredow: The Kessel Run is set up in that show. There is a, a set of buoys through this tumultuous space storm, and there's only kind of one way in, and it's a circuitous route that requires multiple hyperspace jumps to get into Kessel. This is all kind of, to, to make true the number of parsecs it takes to get out of Kessel.
Rob Bredow: Kessel, which sounds fast, but it's also a unit of distance. So we wanted to back into that, right? So we make this circuitous route through a space storm. [00:15:00] There's only one way in and out. We make it really clear. It's really complicated to get in. Then on their way out, they go to leave the same way. And of course the Imperial blockade blocks them.
Rob Bredow: So Han has to make the bold choice to just go into the space storm and find another way out of Kessel, which is, should be impossible, but he's going to figure out how to do it. And it's a very dangerous journey as we learn in the next five, ten minutes of the film. Interestingly, we had a lot of different versions of how the sequence would start.
Rob Bredow: And we had tried this version where we flew the Falcon down the tube and then turned around and went into the way it appears in the film. But then we wanted to try another one, which was, what if the armada was a little closer to us and kind of blocks us on our way between the planet of Kessel and the space storm?
Rob Bredow: And maybe it sends out hundreds of TIE fighters and then we have to find another way to jump into the space storm. And we took that idea quite a long ways. In fact, it was in the cut for a long time. And I remember we were well into post production, and I had, I had a little folder of omits I want to try to get back on [00:16:00] my desktop that I would just thumb through all the time to see what the story needed and if there was anything we could plus visually, and this painting came up of Brent's Brett's, and I was like, oh, this, we gotta get this back in the film, and I actually think the way the edit was coming together, the visual storytelling of the clarity of that moment, of the Star Destroyers of blocking the single tube was going to actually be clearer than the hundreds of TIE fighters that coming after our, our heroes.
Rob Bredow: And also, we didn't want to make the TIE Fighters weak. If there's hundreds of TIE Fighters and the Falcon can survive them, then, it might make them not as threatening as, you know, five or six meaningful TIE Fighters that you have to evade and get away from. So I made the pitch to Ron and the editor, and they both really liked it.
Rob Bredow: They loved the image. They loved the painting. Can we still do this? Yeah. So we went back to previs or postvis at this point brought to life some of those moments. And then, if I'm not mistaken,Todd, this was a shot you composited.
Todd Vaziri: We did not set this up. This is you, you, we did not coordinate this. I just want everybody to know, and I'm gonna hear you describing it. And I'm like, wait, is he talking about the shot that I did? So, [00:17:00] uh, yeah, that's the shot I did. And you also tortured me because we did two different versions, because we did a version for the trailer, where it was as if the camera was mounted to the front of the Falcon. You didn't see anything other than what was in front of you. The the vortex and the Star Destroyer back there. And then for the final real movie, we were going to put the cockpit of the Falcon, the iconic circular cockpit so that changed the way the shot kind of turned out.
Todd Vaziri: But thanks for that torture.
Rob Bredow: I love it.
Todd Vaziri: But this shot was a total joy to work on particularly you know, combining the iconography of the Star Destroyer in this foreign star, non real, we haven't really seen something like this in Star Wars before, but the backlit electricity, lightning bolts and everything going on, it really made for a lot of fun.
Rob Bredow: I love the fact that in that one shot you see there's something wrong, like there's a weird darkness down there. You can't quite make it out until the lightning strikes and you get the silhouette, which was the thing we were pitching from the beginning, like [00:18:00] the silhouette of the Star Destroyer revealing the shape of it.
Rob Bredow: And then. You know, similar to what you were talking about that Rog and the whole team on Into Darkness did the whole point of the Star Destroyer was it was too big to fit in the tunnel. So it was always occluded on the top and on the sides by the, by the space tunnel around it, by the space storm tunnel on every side.
Rob Bredow: So it almost didn't fit and made it feel huge and scary. And actually there's a couple shots of it there that I think really helps sell that scale.
Todd Vaziri: That's great. Yeah, that was a super fun shot. Good way to kick off the sequence.
Jenny Ely: So that's not a CBB for you, Todd?
Rob Bredow: No, that's, definitely my final.
Todd Vaziri: And then I'll also consider that one of my finals.
Rob Bredow: Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a highlight for sure. I've actually got Brett's painting up on my wall. So it's a highlight.
Todd Vaziri: Brett has been giving us some amazing artwork to try to figure out how to make cool shots out of I mean, it's he did some Episode III: Revenge of the Sith artwork that I ended up working on. The big climactic lightsaber battle between Obi Wan [00:19:00] and Anakin. And I'll always be grateful for his amazing work.
Todd Vaziri: Every single show, Brett and the art department come up with amazing things.
Rob Bredow: It's an amazing team. So that's our feature about one final one CBB, and that takes us into our main topic of the day, Todd. Let's talk a little bit about dailies culture and what makes a
Todd Vaziri: Ah dailies! It's time for dailies, Rob! We gotta get down there.
Rob Bredow: Yes, exactly. What are some things Todd, an artist can do to make dailies great.
Todd Vaziri: Dailies, you know, every facility is going to have a slightly different methodology for dailies. Every supervisor is going to have their own ideas and style for dailies, but there are a lot of generalities that we can talk about that are fairly consistent around the world and around facilities.
Todd Vaziri: I mean, put it simply, dailies is the place where we all get together and talk about the shots. We, typically artists present what they've done the day before and they present them in a hopefully a cogent way. And the [00:20:00] supervisors will comment on it and say, this is what's important about this, the shot.
Todd Vaziri: This is what's important about the sequence. And here's how we go forward. Sounds pretty straightforward. But you know, even seasoned visual effects artists can sometimes get bogged down and, you know, there's, there's a lot of ways to have dailies go off the rails pretty quickly, and you don't want to spend too much time all in the same room or all in a Zoom session and a screen sharing session where you're going off on tangents. You're going off on something that may be better done in a meeting or in an offshoot meeting or or an email. It could have been an email. The rules of thumb that I like to think about when I like to present my shots and dailies.
Todd Vaziri: The whole point of it is, like I said, we want it to be super efficient, but we want a lot of eyes on it, not just a bunch of leads and supervisors, but there's multiple people working on any one sequence and we're all working on several shots. So for one thing, I want to be there in dailies [00:21:00] when my sequence is up, even if I don't necessarily have a shot.
Todd Vaziri: But if the shot before it or shot after it, that's important. So you understand the context. of how your shot plays and any, any feedback that the other shots are getting, how can you integrate that into your shot?
Rob Bredow: This is the mark of a great artist right here. Getting the context of the sequence, hearing those notes, understanding the bigger picture. And then immediately folding that in like, I heard you say this about the green glow in this other shot. I integrated into these other shots. You're skipping several steps that might have to go multiple iterations if you're not staying that step ahead, right?
Todd Vaziri: No shot as an Island. And that green glow, okay, but we want the green, we don't, but we don't want it hyper saturated and we want to backlight the characters. We do not want to front light the characters. So that's something for you to keep in mind when you're working on your shot, silhouette and shape is more important than front lighting or beauty lighting.
Todd Vaziri: So that's other people's shots when it comes to your own a couple general rules of thumb [00:22:00] for me. When your shot comes up you say, this is my shot. This is what I did. This is what I haven't done or what's wrong and this is what I plan to do. Pretty straightforward. And then any questions and then, and then just. Shut your trap and just let the feedback come in , which is sometimes really hard because it's so easy to get defensive about the things you haven't done yet. It's so easy to say, I just, I haven't gotten that element yet. And to take a combative point of view. no, it's, it's best to say, this is what I've done, this is what I haven't done. And here are my questions, or what I'm going to do. And it's a really good framework to get things going.
Rob Bredow: There's no better way to help the supervisor help you. The supervisor at the front of the room is thinking about maybe 500 shots. And at least 100 shots are coming up that day. To be reminded of what Todd's saying, oh, this is the things you said last time.
Rob Bredow: Which is fantastic. It also helps keep things on a consistent track. You're like, you [00:23:00] said, make it warmer here. It's warmer. I had another version where I made it too warm. I thought this was about the right balance. All of a sudden the supervisor's oh, okay, good. I know Todd has a good eye. So if he said he looked at it too warm and this was a good balance, I'll bet, I'll bet it is about right.
Rob Bredow: Or maybe I have some extra context that Todd didn't have, but you just set the whole room up for success when you give that context to your shot.
Todd Vaziri: Right. I mean, and it can, you know, there are some supervisors who want to see a lot of stuff in dailies every day. There's others that are like, no, no, no, no, no. Make sure you hit at, and this is what I try to tell people, this is my style. If you've gotten seven notes, hit four of them, and if you feel like you're still, you have to wait for three more things that you can't exactly hit, you're waiting for animation, you're waiting for a new camera, you're waiting for some other element of the pipeline.
Todd Vaziri: Even those four things, if you think that that will be worthwhile to, to move the shot forward. Throw it in dailies. If not, if those were like housekeeping stuff, if it was [00:24:00] making a little thing a little bit cleaner in the background or something, just to get it up to speed. Don't put it in dailies and obviously talk to your coordinators and talk to your production people and make sure everybody's in the loop that goes without saying, but having, you know, too many shots and dailies can be a real problem too many shots with nothing to provide feedback on, but it's like, well, okay, you, you did those three little things or not much.
Todd Vaziri: Alright, well, thanks next shot, you know, that, so that, and that's, that takes up time, and speaking of time…
Rob Bredow: Yes, What's the right length for dailies, Todd? What's the magic? There is a right, is there a right answer?
Todd Vaziri: I, I struggle with this all the time, I have this internal battle because I absolutely understand and I agree that dailies should be as short as possible. But also that is a special time.
Todd Vaziri: It is a time for everybody to look at all eyes looking at the same screen at the same time and soliciting [00:25:00] ideas from a lot of different people, from leads and artists. There is a bit of a dilation that can happen at say at the beginning of the show, when you have an hour block for dailies, but you only have five shots in dailies. We will magically fill that hour with those five shots.
Rob Bredow: It's never shorter than an hour.
Todd Vaziri:Like 58 minutes. Oh, I guess we should wrap this up, you know? But, you know, it's I think David Fincher has a quote, you know, when people get on him about doing too many takes on set with, with actors and he's like, I don't, I don't understand why people complain about this, we built these sets, we set up the lights, we have the actors here. Let's do it. Let's want to be here as long as we can until we get it, right? Let's not rush out of this. You can also feel the same way about dailies. We're all here we had a lot of eyes a lot of great people all looking at the same thing and you know and it even helps like let's say we've had a director call, and we're trying to hit a bunch of notes from [00:26:00] that director call.
Todd Vaziri: Well, we all take really good notes, and we all try to, you know, have pretty good memories, but we can't remember everything. So having seven or eight, eight people that were in that call, all in dailies, that can remember, you know, we're all crowdsourcing our information there. Oh, did we really hit this note? What did the director say? They wanted it to go screen left or screen right. Somebody's going to know. And that is something that happens spontaneously. It's a very human thing. And, you know, there's your efficiency right there.
Todd Vaziri: So when you're going a million miles an hour through dailies you're not going to have those moments.
Todd Vaziri: So I, I always struggle with, and we, we will for til the end of time.
Rob Bredow: Yes, exactly. There is no one perfect link, but you're right, like figuring out an efficient way, both in what the submissions are and, and how you're moving through, especially you've talked about early in the show, you got five shots that later in the show, you got 200 shots. Boy, you have to really move or know how to prioritize or filter down or take things offline in order to have a reasonable length dailies.
Rob Bredow: Cause you don't want your whole crew sitting there for three hours. Not working on their shots. [00:27:00] At the same time, you do want all those eyes on the work. And my favorite kind of dailies is when someone who is newer to the shot goes is, did you mean, did you mean for that to be this way? And you're, and everyone is benefiting from the fresh eyes of a talented artist or a talented person in production who just caught something that would have, you know, probably been a problem down the road.
Todd Vaziri: Happens all the time.
Rob Bredow: That kind of input. I mean, something you said. Just reminded me how important it is and how I'm so grateful that our teams all take their own notes too, because just the act of taking your own notes helps you commit it to memory. and yes, our production teams are taking amazing notes.
Rob Bredow: We got these fantastic notes sent out afterwards, but there's nothing like having pen and paper or digitally taking those notes in those actual sessions.
Todd Vaziri: Yeah. I mean, I, one, one thing I am, I'm a stickler on for myself. And probably for some others is that I cannot imagine going into a dailies room without a pen and paper. I just, I have to write down the notes. And even when I come back to my desk and I'm just [00:28:00] looking at this chicken scratch like what, what did I write?
Todd Vaziri: No, no, no. It forces you to remember what was the series of notes? What was the series of feedback? You know, we're all throwing out frame numbers and shot numbers and, who to ask for help for the, the camera on this. I have to write everything down and what I do is the first thing I do when I get back to my desk, when I have a moment to breathe, actually bring up my take and then I re transcribe my notes into something that makes, you know, more human sense so that I know I've got all the big bullet point hits and it refreshes my memory, oh yeah, that's when we talked about this, that's when we talked about that.
Todd Vaziri: I know other people have better memories than me, but boy, pen and paper, important.
Rob Bredow: I agree, want to double down on that. And then also just what an incredible environment for learning it is. I mean, to be around supervisors like the people we've named or to be in John Knoll’s dailies, the way he talks about composing a shot, I've learned so much from the supervisors here. And I remember when I first got [00:29:00] to Sony Imageworks daily, we were doing dailies on film every day and I had been at other places working on film, but we didn't have the opportunity to have film dailies every day. So on Stuart Little, the film dailies would come up and it was, John Dykstra and Jerome Chen were the two visual effects supervisors and four great CG supervisors on that show too. The daily, the film dailies would pop up and as the slate blinked by in, I think two frames, I think it was a two frame slate and three frames of black.
Rob Bredow: The first slate would pop by and they'd go, Oh, the bath's a little warm today, as it blinks by. And I, I'd seen film, I'd done a lot of projects and I remember the first day and dailies going, I am not going to make it here because I do not see what they're seeing.
Rob Bredow: And it was, it was literally what, what is that? A 12th of a second, a 12th of a second, the slate would blink by and they immediately saw the color of it. And then they'd be talking about the bath and talking about the film developing and, you know, for those of you who are nostalgic for the days of film, you don't, you're not, I promise you, you're not this nostalgic for the variation in color you would get every [00:30:00] day to, you'd have to try to look through to imagine what the shot would look like if it was timed properly or if it was the right color and meet like in terms of learning in dailies.
Rob Bredow: I remember four weeks in still am I seeing what they're seeing? And then six weeks in that slate blinked by and I went, it looks a little cyan to me, like in that 12th of a second. And I, and then two months in, I could consistently say Oh, that looks a little, that's a point of red, or that's two points missing red.
Rob Bredow: And I realized like in a really short time, just being in dailies, paying attention, watching carefully, I was actually developing my eye because of all the help of the experts around me.
Todd Vaziri: You know what the best part of film dailies was when it was projected on a big screen?
Rob Bredow: I think I know what you're going to say.
Todd Vaziri: You can't pause on a frame.
Rob Bredow: That’s right.
Todd Vaziri: You got one chance, real time, 24 frames per second. And you're calling final. I do enjoy the ceremony of the film dailies after we filmed things out. To all get in a room and, you know, as opposed to regular dailies where we're really, you [00:31:00] know, zooming in on the pixels and really tearing a shot apart.
Todd Vaziri: Film dailies is, let's just view what we've finaled or what's near final and make sure it works at 24 frames per second good projection, are we in the ballpark? Are we doing the right job? And, uh, never, never ever forget on Hulk. When, you know, we're all in the show, we're on the show for, this is the Ang Lee Hulk picture. Dennis Muren wanted to show us, we're halfway through the show and we already had a series of finals. And he's like, I want to show you this finals reel. We're obviously, we're not done with the movie yet, but what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to flop the film. We're going to, we're going to flop the film on the reel.
Todd Vaziri: And so we get to watch our shots that we've all been working on for so long, for so hard in a slightly different way. And, when, when he showed the reel, these are all our shots. We put our blood, sweat and tears into them. And it almost like we're watching a totally new movie and it developed insight. And then of [00:32:00] course, that's what I learned from Dennis and others. The best way to get fresh eyes on, on a shot that you've been really pouring your heart into is to flop it. And maybe that'll give you a little bit of a slightly different perspective on it. And it works.
Rob Bredow: I love the quote from, I think it was Ken Ralston who would run film dailies. and, you know, we might have three minutes of film or something. We'd run the film dailies, watch it all the way through. And immediately, of course, you're ready to go back to the beginning, watch it again. But Ken would be like, you're going to have to leave the theaters and pay your 10 bucks again, if you want to see it again, I'm ready to final these shots.
Rob Bredow: But Ken had that, understanding what the important part of the shot is instead of just, can you polish every pixel? Cause that it can become a process of finding imperfections, but if you can turn dailies into a session where everyone's trying to plus the shot and make it better, then you just get so much better work.
Todd Vaziri: Yeah, let's talk about how to make the shot better.
Jenny Ely: So it sounds like maybe you guys aren't a fan of the, just call people when their shots are ready in dailies. Like you, you feel like people should be there through the entire thing?
Todd Vaziri: [00:33:00] I think that's important uh, when we're nearing the end of the show and we are having 200 shots and dailies, I think that's important because everybody's got a lot of runway. They already know the spirit of the show. They know the style of the show. They know the style of the supervisor to limit the amount of time that you're in that room, near the end of the show, I think is very important. The beginning of the show, in the middle less so.
Rob Bredow: Yeah, a hundred percent figuring out those different phases of the show and when you're moving from one to the other and when you're going to go from, you know, maybe there's one dailies a day to dailies and afternoonlies. So you got a morning review and an afternoon session or whether you're going to break into other kind of afternoon reviews so you can get more ad hoc reviews. I mean, really every show is going to find its own cadence there. And I've seen so many other, there's so many good ways to do that.
Todd Vaziri: Yep.
Rob Bredow: Well, I expect this will not be the final time that dailies comes up on this podcast, Todd.
Todd Vaziri: Nope. It's foreverlies.
Rob Bredow: Exactly. Well, it's fun to [00:34:00] talk a little bit about dailies and a good dailies culture, and we'll talk more in the future about it, for sure. So our tradition, our tradition that we're going to establish today on this podcast, seen as this is episode one of Light or Darker, is to wrap up each podcast with something called the Martini. And the Martini is going to be our opportunity to just, for fun, highlight one thing that we think is interesting out in the world.
Rob Bredow: It could be anything related to visual effects or visual storytelling or not. But the reason we call it the Martini is because it's the last shot of the day. It's the On stage term for when the martini is coming up, it's your last setup. And usually that means you've got another 20, 30 minutes in the day before you're actually done shooting.
People hearing the celebration call on set that the martini is coming, or this is the martini that we're on is always a nice feeling. Plus it's a nice, it's a nice word. So that's why we've called this, this little feature, the martini. Todd, did you bring something for us today?
Todd Vaziri: I did. [00:35:00] Talking about nice things. One of the nicest things for me is seeing older movies that I already love . I've had two very good experiences recently where I got to introduce one of my kids to a movie for the first time in a movie theater. It's it was 1979's Alien, Ridley Scott's masterpiece.
Todd Vaziri: And he was able to see the movie, 12 years old. He was ready for it. Every kid is different. You know, you cannot, there's no one proper age for a movie like Alien but he's pretty well versed in cinema and scary stuff, so he was totally ready for it and he enjoyed it a lot. But seeing it on a big screen with the lights dimmed, huge screen, huge sound, no interruptions, no chances of pausing and getting a glass of water or anything like that. Really enhanced the experience and I think it's something that he's going to remember for a very long time. I mean, he, he had his eyes covered at the exact right [00:36:00] moments. I'm like, yeah, it's working. It's working. And then a couple weeks later, we got to see Run Lola Run, which is a 1999 German film by Tom Tikwer.
Todd Vaziri: And it is one of my favorite movies of all time. I think I've seen it maybe 20, 30 times. And when I heard that there was an anniversary screening of it coming in the theaters, I'm like, of course we're going to go. And of course the whole family is a huge fan of that movie. The soundtrack is amazing. We took the whole family who has all seen the movie, at least three times, not as many as me, of course, but we all went to see it and really had a blast and Run Lola Run is one of those movies that every time you see it, you learn a little bit, something new because of its innovative structure and the characterizations.
Todd Vaziri: I absolutely adore that movie, but, you know, getting the opportunity to see something that you already know and love. And a big screen with potentially, preferably with other people who maybe have never seen it before, is quite a joy for the movie fan. It's as close as you can get to watching a [00:37:00] movie for the first time that you already know and love is enjoying it with somebody who's seeing it for the first time.
Todd Vaziri: And the movie theater experience, the best way to do it. So that's mine. And I hope, I hope more movies get old movies get played in theaters. It's always a thrill. I think right now, like Close Encounters is in theaters. I know Casablanca is doing the rounds, Rear Window's doing the rounds. go see it if you
Rob Bredow: I had that experience with Jurassic Park. The Academy did a special film screening of Jurassic Park a few years ago. And man, was I excited to watch that in a packed theater with an amazing sound system with a bunch of fans. And boy, does that movie hold up?
Todd Vaziri: That's terrific.
Rob Bredow: I mean, everything down to Jeff Goldblum laying on his side with his open shirt and you're like, Oh yeah, this was the nineties, but the film is so beautifully crafted and it's so much fun to watch with a full theater like you say, uninterrupted, the great sound system, the Academy at the Academy Museum does I think they're like 10 tickets for film screenings. They have a 70 millimeter projector.
Rob Bredow: They can project film and digital beautiful quality in an [00:38:00] amazing theater, if you're in LA take a look at the film screening schedule at the Academy, because it's remarkable. In Northern California, there's stuff for guilds and everything too, but that one's open to the public. Definitely a cool opportunity to see film on the big screen. Jenny, what did you bring us for our martini?
Jenny Ely: All right, first I want to say that I also saw Alien in the theater recently, and we saw it at a very, very old theater that has not been updated. There was no reclining seats. Your, you know, your knees were crammed into the row in front of you. It was extremely uncomfortable, so I feel like I got the actual experience it back then. And this place was so old, like even the popcorn tasted like it was from 1979. And me and my group of friends, we were the only people in the theater, so it was a really fun special experience.
Todd Vaziri: Claustrophobic and isolating, just like Alien!
Jenny Ely: Yes Oh, and speaking of claustrophobic and isolating, we also saw The Abyss recently in the theater. And it felt like a two and a half hour panic attack. I had actually never seen The Abyss before. I'd avoid it for that very reason. Because [00:39:00] I get a little claustrophobic with anything that takes place. Any kind of space shuttle tragedy movie or you know, ocean disaster, it, it, it makes me uncomfortable and gives me anxiety, but you know, my film buff husband and friends were like, we're, you have to see this in the theater, you have no choice.
Jenny Ely: So, I made it through, but it was quite the experience to see it actually in the theater. So we're always on the hunt for those. So my martini for the week, and I'm going to crave a martini every time we do this now. Just so you know.
Rob Bredow: Fair.
Jenny Ely: My martini for this episode is my new favorite app that I am obsessed with.
Jenny Ely: I am a bit of an organizational nerd, so I love any kind of app that helps me organize. But the problem is, I have so many of them that it becomes chaos. The new one that I've discovered that I am using for everything now is called Todoist. So if you love a good to do list where you can cross organize everything in your life, I absolutely recommend this app.
Jenny Ely: So you can separate things out into [00:40:00] projects. It's very, very intuitive where you can just type in, it's not like doing, a Google calendar where you have to go in and do like, I'm going to edit this for the first Monday of every month. You just type in the first Monday of every month and it intuitively adds it to your calendar.
Jenny Ely: So, You can separate out projects. You can connect it to your Google calendar. It is so lovely. And it is now my one app to rule them all for organization.
Rob Bredow: Nice Todoist. Great recommendation. Mine completely unrelated to anything productive or film. But my daughter's got me something called a Bird Buddy for father's day. Well, first I should warn you, this is not an inexpensive bird feeder. It's 230, 250 right now on Amazon, I think. So it's an expensive bird feeder, but they knew what would interest me because it has a built in camera. And the one that got me has a solar charger on the top. So you don't constantly have to charge the battery. And of course you can put bird food in it. It attracts birds. And then the camera does a live feed to your [00:41:00] app so you can like watch the camera, but even better than that, cause you're not going to watch it all the time.
Rob Bredow: It collects using AI the birds that visit takes really nice stills of them and sends you video when it gets a good video. It uses AI to identify the birds. So I've learned all, we've learned like eight different birds that visit our bird feeders around here. It's really delightful. If we have, if we have the ability, I'll post a couple of bird buddy shots on the follow up for this episode.
Rob Bredow: But delightful. I get nothing if you buy one, but it's really delightful. And I, you know, when I first got it, I'm like, I like birds, but now I really, I'm really interested in the birds that are flying around our place because you just learn more about the birds in your neighborhood.
Jenny Ely: Oh, you should play Wingspan. Have you played Wingspan? I know you don't have time to play board games, but Wingspan is a phenomenal board game that is very peaceful. And it's exactly what you're describing. Every card has the actual, like a natural drawing of the bird and their habitat.
Jenny Ely: It is lovely.
Rob Bredow: I do a lot of travel. So having the remote feed of a peaceful part of the house where the birds might come to visit, [00:42:00] it's, it's quite nice.
Todd Vaziri: It's a nice little meditation.
Rob Bredow: Exactly. Well, thank you, Todd. Thank you, Jenny. And thank you all for listening to the Lighter Darker podcast. If you have a question for the show or you'd like to suggest a future topic, we want to hear from you.
Rob Bredow: Email us at lighterdarker@ilm.com. That's all one word, lighterdarker@ilm.com. Or you can reach out to Todd or I on social media. Todd, where do we find you on social media these days?
Todd Vaziri: Can find me at tvaziri.com.
Rob Bredow: Your website and my website is just my name, robbredow.com. If you want to find me on social media on the about page, I've got all the links to all the various places since it changes rapidly these days.
Rob Bredow: Show notes and transcripts for this episode and all episodes can be found on ilm.com slash lighter, darker. That's all one word. And thanks to ILM VFX supervisors, Khatsho Orfali, he did that opening music sting and Pablo Helman, who provided the outro music you are hearing right now for today's episode, look up Pablo on SoundCloud it's under the Surfwood [00:43:00] Circle Band.
Rob Bredow: If you have music you would like to feature on Light Darker reach out to us at our email, LighterDarker@ ilm.com. We thank Industrial Light Magic for hosting the Lighter Darker podcast. This show is produced by Rob Bredow and Jenny Ely. Today's episode has been edited by Chris Hawkinson, and we want to thank the entire ILM PR team, led by Greg Grusby, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help make this all happen.
Rob Bredow: Thank you so much for listening to the Lighter Darker podcast, especially this premiere episode. And until next time, may your pixels be both lighter and darker.
