Trevor Hogg scopes out the visual effects work in David Fincher’s The Killer
K eeping as much of the filmmaking process in-house as possible was the philosophy adopted by David Fincher and is the reason why visual effects, editorial and digital intermediate have been integrated into an internal pipeline that allows for a seamless flow of digital files between departments.
“We do our DI and some visual effects compositing in-house,” explains Peter Mavromates, post producer. “If the imagery doesn’t look quite right to our visual effects editor Casey Curtiss, he’ll go and consult our colourist and they’ll move the files over into the Baselight and take a look at that. There’s a lot of hands-on all the way around.”
900 visual effects shots were created for The Killer by Ollin VFX, Savage VFX, Ar temple-Hollywood and Wylie Co. over what was initially meant to be a period of eight months. “The reason why I’m being vague there is we were delivering for December 2022/ Januar y 2023, but then Netflix decided to release The Killer in November of 2023, and David is someone who you have to peel the project out of his hands because he wants to keep improving it,” explains Mavromates. “We ended up working for many more months because he had the time. The real satisfaction for all of us who work with him repeatedly is that when he works on stuff, it gets better. It just does.”
Stuntvis took priority over previs. “Dave Macomber, who was the stunt coordinator, would shoot these videos and choreograph the work based on set designs that he got from Donald Graham Burt,” remarks Mavromates. “He would post it and David on PIX would work them up and explain why he wanted to do this, not that. It was a masterclass to see those two go back and for th. The stuntvis also informed Don Burt about cer tain set things that had to happen in order to make the stunts happen. It’s interesting the conversations that come up, because Dave Macomber was worried about the Killer getting Hodges’ body [Charles Parnell] into the green bin, and it was one of those things where he is over thinking it. David said, ‘That’s not going to be a problem’. The way our editor Kirk Baxter cut it, that body is in that green bin in under five seconds!”
