ONE SHOT WONDER

TREVOR HOGG GOES DOWN INTO THE TRENCHES WITH GUILLAUME ROCHERON TO LEARN ABOUT THE OSCAR WINNING VISUAL EFFECTS OF 1917

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In order to honour the stories told by his grandfather about being a soldier during World War I and immerse the audience in the experience, filmmaker Sam Mendes (Skyfall) decided to follow the mission of British lance corporals Tom Blake (DeanCharles Chapman) and William Schofield (George MacKay) to call off an attack through war-torn France as if it was a single shot. The concept led to a rethinking of the traditional way of tackling visual effects, which are normally divided by shots and sequences. The postproduction period for 1917 lasted 17 weeks with digital augmented imagery encompassing 91 per cent of the theatrical runtime.

“Visual effects pipelines are not good at handling shots that are over 500 frames, which is a 20-second shot,” notes production VFX supervisor Guillaume Rocheron (Ghost In The Shell). “On this movie we had some takes that were seven minutes long and others that were a couple of seconds. One thing that we realised quickly is that shots can’t be defined by cutting from one to the other because the shot count becomes too long, but also when the shot goes to the next one, we have to work to connect them.”

With the continuous shot approach making dividing the workload tricky and the methodology of stitching being so specific and precise, the decision was made for MPC to be the sole visual effects vendor on the project. “It required a lot of planning from MPC just to logistically handle the movie, because how do you design, split and review the work?”

A close collaboration was had with cinematographer Roger Deakins (Blade Runner 2049) and editor Lee Smith (