Napoleon - Ridley Scott's film with Joaquin Phoenix

Started by Immortan Jonesy, Oct 14, 2020, 08:31:32 PM

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Napoleon - Ridley Scott's film with Joaquin Phoenix (Read 85,859 times)

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯

Haven't had a chance to listen to this yet:

https://twitter.com/beforesmag/status/1757087170249257314

No sign of a Napoleon Blu-Ray/4k release yet. There was speculation from the physical media enthusiast accounts that it would release in February but still no official word. Only seen this movie once so far.

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯

New interview with Neil Corbould and his team conducted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:

Quote from: Academy of Motion Picture ArtsReenacting Waterloo: 'Napoleon' VFX Team on Charging Into Battle With Ridley Scott (Exclusive)

In 2001, Special Effects Supervisor Neil Corbould won his first Oscar for his work on Ridley Scott's historical epic, Gladiator. Now more than two decades later, his latest Oscar nomination comes for another Scott-directed historical epic, Napoleon. "Ridley Scott loves the realism of blending SFX and VFX," explains Corbould.

"Napoleon showcases two disciplines marrying up, weaving into one another perfectly," he adds. "I defy anyone to pick a shot and identify what is practical and what is CG because it is very difficult to tell."

Napoleon brings the true story of Napoleon Bonaparte (played by Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix) to the screen on a major scale, exploring the notorious French ruler's rise and downfall through a number of key battles. Corbould, along with Visual Effects Supervisors Charley Henley, Luc-Ewen Martin Fenouillet, and Simone Coco, were tasked with realizing Scott's visions of those iconic clashes.

At the 96th Oscars, Napoleon is up for three awards: Best Costume Design, Best Production Design and Best Visual Effects. Henley says the latter nomination was especially unexpected. "I never really had that impression when I started on Napoleon," he admits.

"But we realized there was something special about it. It feels like an old-time epic, where you could have 50,000 people available," Henley explains. " You can't do it today, but it has that feeling. That's why I'm so pleased with the end result, especially watching it after a while. The nomination is a nod towards that."

From Waterloo to pigeon poo, the team reveals to A.frame what went into Napoleon's Oscar-nominated visual effects.

A.frame: There are VFX and SFX, and Napoleon has a lot of crossover. On set, how often did the reality of any given day match the plan? Ridley Scott does very clear storyboards, but many of these locations also presented challenging environments.

Neil Corbould: The thing with Ridley is that he does plan everything with his storyboards to get his vision across to us. I've been fortunate, because I've worked with him several times, as has Charlie, so we know what we're getting into. You can plan and plan, but when you get to day one of the shoot, Ridley takes it to another level, so we have to be super prepared. I briefed all 25 of my floor crew — which is unheard of — to cover the multi-cameras that Ridley shoots. We had a minimum of eight camera, going up to 16 with crash cameras and everything, so the crew was briefed to expect the unexpected. The tricky thing was camera operators would pick shots, and you've got to try to find where they are. Ridley would say, "Get some smoke in front of B camera or G camera," and you'd think, "Where the hell is G camera?" There was a lot of running around to try and find where these people were.

There are a number of impressive set pieces in Napoleon, the first being the moment with the horse and the cannonball during the Siege of Toulon. That was shot from multiple perspectives, but not many takes.

Luc-Ewen Martin Fenouillet: We couldn't do many takes, bearing in mind the reset time it would take to do the explosion. The chest cavity had a real charge, so it needed to be loaded if we wanted to re-shoot it again. Neil made this amazing animatronic that was essentially the bust of the neck and the head for the horse, and we had a stunt person that was really falling off the rig. It didn't have any legs, so we knew we had to replace the legs, but then it was a jigsaw puzzle of figuring out what from the real elements was most valuable for us and what needed to be done or replaced. There were many fantastic details from the animatronic horse, including some of the guts and the innards exploding towards the camera, and the neck wobbling in this unnatural but fascinatingly morbid manner. We decided to keep most of that and all the little bits of blobs getting stuck into the fur. All of those fine details would be really time-consuming to do in CGI, so we decided to keep as much of that as possible and focus on the rest of the image we didn't have and needed to recreate from scratch. It was a great mix of practical and VFX in the end.

Henley: It was tough for everybody while we were shooting it. Ridley drew these pictures early on, and everyone was like, "How are we going to do that in the middle of this battle?" Neil did a lot of stuff up front before we started filming to figure it out and work out the moves. He showed us some animation of the move that was in a programmed rig, so we could throw the guy off the horse many times — and we did — but we couldn't do many chest explosions. We had multiple cameras shooting it simultaneously, which was run-of-the-mill for most of this film.

The Battle of Waterloo is another case of blending in-camera elements with VFX to make it look epic, especially considering the mass of people required for the sequence. How did you go about that?

Henley: Luc was on VFX for that. We had about 500 soldiers and about 100 horses, and then Luc made that into the number we needed. Neil took the lead on location. He was there blowing things up, firing cannons and all of that. We had 14 real cannons that would fire, smoke and kickback, so there were a lot of practical effects on a smaller scale that were the basis of it all.

Corbould: We designed an air-firing cannon, because we didn't want people standing in front of live black powder-firing cannons. We came up with this compressed air and had talcum powder wads in the end, creating a giant plume of white powder that looked surprisingly like smoke. Then, we put a mechanical recoil in. The great thing about that is you could get people right in front of it, and the safety factor was very high. They were also relatively quick to reload. That was something new that we developed, especially for this movie.

Each of the battle sequences — including Waterloo and the Battle of Austerlitz — feature so many soldiers dressed in different uniforms. How did you tackle that?

Coco: We recreated all the armies with different variations on body, shape and so on. We also integrated supplementary accessories, which meant we could introduce diversity for each one. From that, you select what you want for each of the 10,000 people, so you tell the system that you want a different combination across everything, creating a pipeline that allows us to do that very quickly. Charlie and the team spent five days or a week on motion capture, so they shot a huge number of different motions from running to dying, falling from horses or horses running, different motions from the horses, or a battle with five or six people together, and then put those together and put it into the system. That was when we could pick it up and decide which action we wanted and which soldiers to pick.

Much of what Ridley Scott had drawn out in his animatics was very detailed, down to the weather he wanted if it wasn't captured in camera. How important were those to the VFX process, and did much of that change?

Henley: The Battle of Waterloo is quite an excellent example of this, because he started drawing these boards in color but hadn't done that the last time I worked with him. These boards were incredible and could bring another level of atmosphere to a particular scene. With Waterloo, it was going to be really nasty weather. He said, "There are going to be these storm clouds. It will be dark, moody and rainy at the beginning, and these clouds are going to cast shadows across the landscape." That was all in his boards, rather than the script. I don't know whether Ridley has a direct line to whoever controls the weather, but we got this amazing weather when we shot. On the first day, we had real rain, sleet and wind, so the flags were blowing like crazy in this wind. Neil had his own rain there, but because of the natural wind on the day, the rain he created was going sideways.

Corbould: Our rain towers were about 50 meters up, and it would have just been horizontal, which was useless.

Henley: It was a 10-day shoot, and the weather wasn't always like that, but we had that at the beginning so we could reproduce it.

Fenouillet: Whenever we had a shot without the rain at the beginning of the sequence, we'd have to add the rain, but then later down the sequence, when the sky cleared, the sky started to become too blue and pretty, which didn't work for the epic third act battle so we had to add stormy clouds for the end to tie in with the rest of the drama.

We've talked about the epic sequences, but the devil is often in the details of this film. One example in Napoleon is the pigeon poop.

Henley: We found the birds in his drawings, and he really liked them. You always have to watch out and ensure that you get everything that he's drawn filmed on the day, because otherwise, we'll add it later. He remembers it. Getting the real pigeons doing the right thing on the day wasn't going to happen, and the poop was something that came up in post-production. It was Ridley's idea, and it was like, "Well, we've got the pigeons on camera!" In the movie, Napoleon has turned up, and it's not looking good. Everybody has left and deserted, and he's going on a downer, sitting on the old throne in the Kremlin. He said, "What else do we need to emotionally tell the story and also add a certain mood to it? Can we add this pigeon poop, please?" We ended up shooting it in our VFX office with a mix of paint, splatting it on this little bit of blue screen, and then comping it in. Our in-house team does a lot of work on little things like that and other odd details or requests that come up last minute.

In Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock famously used chocolate sauce to get the right consistency and appearance for blood in the shower scene. Did you have similar trials and conversations to get the poop to look right?

Henley: We had our own little meetings and discussed the consistency. [Laughs] I wouldn't say it was a big meeting, but we did have a few goes at it

https://aframe.oscars.org/news/post/napoleon-visual-effects-interview

Immortan Jonesy



𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯

#889
The Academy Awards interviews Janty Yates and costume designer David Crossman. Janty also hints at what we might see in the Napoleon Director's Cut:

Quote from: Academy of Motion Picture Arts'Napoleon's Janty Yates and David Crossman on Designing Costumes Fit for an Emperor (Exclusive)

Ridley Scott does not make historical films unless they are epic, and his latest — Napoleon — is as towering as its subject. The film chronicles the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix) from military commander to Emperor of France, as well as his eventual downfall, which is mirrored in his relationship with his empress, Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby).


The film was such a massive undertaking that Scott enlisted two of his regular designers, Janty Yates and David Crossman, to split up costuming duties. Napoleon marks Yates' 15th collaboration with the director and Crossman's fourth. Their mission on the film was purposefully straightforward. "Ridley was quite happy with us going by the book on this one," Yates says.

Crossman, who oversaw the creation of the film's military wardrobe, says that he and his team worked hard to ensure that the costumes felt "as authentic as possible."
"You don't want it to ever look like a bunch of reenactors standing around on a field," he notes. "You want it to always look like people wearing their real clothing."

Yates, meanwhile, was in charge of civilian clothes and costumes for Kirby's Josephine, and she set out to dress her in clothes and jewelry that were as close to the real-life empress' attire as possible. "Josephine's jewelry collection still survives to this day. It's in Paris and it's fantastic," Yates reveals. "They didn't offer to lend it to me, but they nearly did!"

"We came close to having around 14 security men standing near me and Vanessa all day, every day," she recalls with a laugh. "Instead of that, we had two very good jewelers come in and make copies of all the original pieces."

At the 96th Oscars, Yates and Crossman are nominated for Best Costume Design, amongst Napoleon's three total nominations. It is Crossman's first nomination, and Yates' first since winning the Oscar in 2001 for her work on Gladiator.

In conversation with A.frame, the designers discuss the collaboration required to pull off a feat like Napoleon: Together, they were able to create thousands of costumes, including more than 4,000 uniforms, and 30 hand-sewn gowns fit for royalty. Which is to say nothing of the film's epic coronation scene.

A.frame: What were the first conversations you had with Ridley about his sartorial vision for Napoleon, and from there, what were some of the first steps you took in designing the costumes?

Janty Yates: Ridley knows by now how I style rich and "important" people, and I said to him, "I think I'd like to do Josephine in shades of white, silver and gold, and just dripping in jewelry." I wanted to keep the rest of the family around her — meaning Napoleon's mother, his three sisters, and Josephine's daughter — conversely covered in very, very light and beautiful, embroidered silks.

David Crossman: With the military uniforms, we started by getting original pieces from the time, original pieces of 1800s and 1790s clothing, and copying those. We took the patterns we found on those and we started working out the line of clothing that Napoleon would wear through 1789, 1790, 1793, and all the way to 1815. We really tried to do it so that the tailoring of his clothing mirrored civilian clothing and the fashion trends of the time by getting all the shapes and colors correct. A huge step right at the outset of pre-production was getting all the embroidery completed, because all of that was done by hand. It takes months and months and months to do that, so we had to know where we were going and who might play what part and try to get all of the coats in the film produced in time. Because none of them existed before we made them.

There were moments where reenactor clothing was actually considered for the film, and nothing against reenactors, but the problem is that their costumes aren't made for films, you know? [Laughs] They're not really meant to look real enough for a movie. With our costumes, we really had to have full control of all the colors and shapes in order to make them look as close to how they did in real life.

The film sees Napoleon dressed in a lot of the clothing that he was painted wearing, but what was it like designing his clothes in the scenes where you didn't have specific references to look at?

Crossman: We put him in a disguise when he's in Toulon and he's riding around gathering information. We tried to make him look like a peasant carpenter would have in that scene. Later, he poses as a beggar in Austerlitz, so we made that for Joaquin as well and then just put a coat on top of it. He goes to a masked ball very briefly and we dressed him up for that, too, but one of the biggest civilian pieces that we put him in was actually his green velvet Russian winter coat. In real life, they all made those themselves when they went to Moscow. They found a load of furs and fabrics hidden away in a shop there, and they made those coats before they left to return to France. Everything else was military or military-esque, though, so it was the uniform art of him and of the time that was our main reference point. Most of the time, it seemed like Napoleon was happy to stay in his military uniforms.

Even when he's trying to pass as a normal person, he doesn't ever really pull that off.

Crossman: Yes. From about 1804 or so on, he was almost like a brand. So, most of the time he wore two costumes: His blue Imperial piece and the green uniform that he wore on campaign, and then he usually coupled those with his gray coat and his bicorne. That was your on-brand Napoleon, and he stuck to that really until the end of his days.

Napoleon wears a number of very finely crafted military uniforms throughout the film. Were any of those your own invention, or were they always pulled directly from paintings or renderings of him?

Crossman: They always come from some form of reference. In this case, the only references we had were paintings or etchings. When he first became general post-Toulon, Napoleon was still penniless, which meant he couldn't afford a general's uniform. So for the scene in the survivors' ball, for instance, we put him in a blue coat with a gold braid, because I'd found one rare etching of him wearing just a braided coat. Then we made a plain version of that coat for him to wear at home. Those outfits aren't explicitly correct military uniforms; they're meant to be expressions of what he's going through financially before he rises to power and becomes a more established general after he fires his cannons at that crowd in Paris.

From that point on, he establishes himself as proper General Napoleon Bonaparte. But paintings are really your few friends on a film like this. They gave us different impressions of each period of his life. There are the more sympathetic and heroic paintings of him, and then there are also the ones that are a little more slanted against him. As a costume designer, you can look at them all and get kind of an overall impression of his journey throughout the film.

In my own research, I saw two very different paintings of his coronation. In one, he looks very imposing and frightening, and in another, he looks very regal and proper.

Crossman: There was a big statue of him that was done after his coronation actually, and he hated it. It made him feel like, "I've become this thing now. The people are going to turn on me," so he had it put away. I think it's at the Duke of Wellington's house now, but things like that filled him with dread. A lot of the portraits that were made of him as Emperor, he hated and had removed.

Josephine starts off as a torn-down aristocrat, rises back up, and then ends somewhere between her highest and lowest points. Her clothing really reflects her arc throughout the film. Janty, what was it like designing her clothes with that journey in mind?

Yates: Well, you've got it right. It's subtle, but it's there. She's penniless in the beginning of the film after she gets out of prison, and we actually did a big section about her time in prison, which will hopefully be in Ridley's Director's Cut. But we felt it was important to really exaggerate her greed, because she did become very greedy when she shacked up with Napoleon and got to use his money! She used it to run up a lot of debt on lots of huge jewelry. That informed a lot about how we styled her in the film. We just kept putting her in more gold and more silver throughout her rise to power, and then we downsized all of that a little in the final third of the film, when she experiences her downturn back to a kind of modesty and she moves to Château de Malmaison.

Did Vanessa have any specific input regarding her costumes?

Yates: She sadly had no real input, because we originally made them for Jodie Comer, but then she had to go and do a play [Prima Facie] — which she triumphed with, I do have to say. Vanessa did have quite strong feelings about her jewelry, though. She didn't want to use too much. She stuck mainly to a lot of necklaces and chokers, probably because they weren't too heavy [Laughs]. But she has a very lovely, almost swan-like neck, so they suited her quite well.

'Napoleon's Janty Yates and David Crossman on Designing Costumes Fit for an Emperor (Exclusive)
'Napoleon's Janty Yates and David Crossman on Designing Costumes Fit for an Emperor (Exclusive)
Feb 15, 2024
Ridley Scott does not make historical films unless they are epic, and his latest — Napoleon — is as towering as its subject. The film chronicles the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte (Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix) from military commander to Emperor of France, as well as his eventual downfall, which is mirrored in his relationship with his empress, Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby).

The film was such a massive undertaking that Scott enlisted two of his regular designers, Janty Yates and David Crossman, to split up costuming duties. Napoleon marks Yates' 15th collaboration with the director and Crossman's fourth. Their mission on the film was purposefully straightforward. "Ridley was quite happy with us going by the book on this one," Yates says.

Crossman, who oversaw the creation of the film's military wardrobe, says that he and his team worked hard to ensure that the costumes felt "as authentic as possible." "You don't want it to ever look like a bunch of reenactors standing around on a field," he notes. "You want it to always look like people wearing their real clothing."

Yates, meanwhile, was in charge of civilian clothes and costumes for Kirby's Josephine, and she set out to dress her in clothes and jewelry that were as close to the real-life empress' attire as possible. "Josephine's jewelry collection still survives to this day. It's in Paris and it's fantastic," Yates reveals. "They didn't offer to lend it to me, but they nearly did!"

"We came close to having around 14 security men standing near me and Vanessa all day, every day," she recalls with a laugh. "Instead of that, we had two very good jewelers come in and make copies of all the original pieces."

At the 96th Oscars, Yates and Crossman are nominated for Best Costume Design, amongst Napoleon's three total nominations. It is Crossman's first nomination, and Yates' first since winning the Oscar in 2001 for her work on Gladiator.

In conversation with A.frame, the designers discuss the collaboration required to pull off a feat like Napoleon: Together, they were able to create thousands of costumes, including more than 4,000 uniforms, and 30 hand-sewn gowns fit for royalty. Which is to say nothing of the film's epic coronation scene.

Image
A.frame: What were the first conversations you had with Ridley about his sartorial vision for Napoleon, and from there, what were some of the first steps you took in designing the costumes?

Janty Yates: Ridley knows by now how I style rich and "important" people, and I said to him, "I think I'd like to do Josephine in shades of white, silver and gold, and just dripping in jewelry." I wanted to keep the rest of the family around her — meaning Napoleon's mother, his three sisters, and Josephine's daughter — conversely covered in very, very light and beautiful, embroidered silks.

David Crossman: With the military uniforms, we started by getting original pieces from the time, original pieces of 1800s and 1790s clothing, and copying those. We took the patterns we found on those and we started working out the line of clothing that Napoleon would wear through 1789, 1790, 1793, and all the way to 1815. We really tried to do it so that the tailoring of his clothing mirrored civilian clothing and the fashion trends of the time by getting all the shapes and colors correct. A huge step right at the outset of pre-production was getting all the embroidery completed, because all of that was done by hand. It takes months and months and months to do that, so we had to know where we were going and who might play what part and try to get all of the coats in the film produced in time. Because none of them existed before we made them.

There were moments where reenactor clothing was actually considered for the film, and nothing against reenactors, but the problem is that their costumes aren't made for films, you know? [Laughs] They're not really meant to look real enough for a movie. With our costumes, we really had to have full control of all the colors and shapes in order to make them look as close to how they did in real life.

The film sees Napoleon dressed in a lot of the clothing that he was painted wearing, but what was it like designing his clothes in the scenes where you didn't have specific references to look at?

Crossman: We put him in a disguise when he's in Toulon and he's riding around gathering information. We tried to make him look like a peasant carpenter would have in that scene. Later, he poses as a beggar in Austerlitz, so we made that for Joaquin as well and then just put a coat on top of it. He goes to a masked ball very briefly and we dressed him up for that, too, but one of the biggest civilian pieces that we put him in was actually his green velvet Russian winter coat. In real life, they all made those themselves when they went to Moscow. They found a load of furs and fabrics hidden away in a shop there, and they made those coats before they left to return to France. Everything else was military or military-esque, though, so it was the uniform art of him and of the time that was our main reference point. Most of the time, it seemed like Napoleon was happy to stay in his military uniforms.

Even when he's trying to pass as a normal person, he doesn't ever really pull that off.

Crossman: Yes. From about 1804 or so on, he was almost like a brand. So, most of the time he wore two costumes: His blue Imperial piece and the green uniform that he wore on campaign, and then he usually coupled those with his gray coat and his bicorne. That was your on-brand Napoleon, and he stuck to that really until the end of his days.

Image
Image
Napoleon wears a number of very finely crafted military uniforms throughout the film. Were any of those your own invention, or were they always pulled directly from paintings or renderings of him?

Crossman: They always come from some form of reference. In this case, the only references we had were paintings or etchings. When he first became general post-Toulon, Napoleon was still penniless, which meant he couldn't afford a general's uniform. So for the scene in the survivors' ball, for instance, we put him in a blue coat with a gold braid, because I'd found one rare etching of him wearing just a braided coat. Then we made a plain version of that coat for him to wear at home. Those outfits aren't explicitly correct military uniforms; they're meant to be expressions of what he's going through financially before he rises to power and becomes a more established general after he fires his cannons at that crowd in Paris.

From that point on, he establishes himself as proper General Napoleon Bonaparte. But paintings are really your few friends on a film like this. They gave us different impressions of each period of his life. There are the more sympathetic and heroic paintings of him, and then there are also the ones that are a little more slanted against him. As a costume designer, you can look at them all and get kind of an overall impression of his journey throughout the film.

In my own research, I saw two very different paintings of his coronation. In one, he looks very imposing and frightening, and in another, he looks very regal and proper.

Crossman: There was a big statue of him that was done after his coronation actually, and he hated it. It made him feel like, "God, I've become this thing now. The people are going to turn on me," so he had it put away. I think it's at the Duke of Wellington's house now, but things like that filled him with dread. A lot of the portraits that were made of him as Emperor, he hated and had removed.

Josephine starts off as a torn-down aristocrat, rises back up, and then ends somewhere between her highest and lowest points. Her clothing really reflects her arc throughout the film. Janty, what was it like designing her clothes with that journey in mind?

Yates: Well, you've got it right. It's subtle, but it's there. She's penniless in the beginning of the film after she gets out of prison, and we actually did a big section about her time in prison, which will hopefully be in Ridley's Director's Cut. But we felt it was important to really exaggerate her greed, because she did become very greedy when she shacked up with Napoleon and got to use his money! She used it to run up a lot of debt on lots of huge jewelry. That informed a lot about how we styled her in the film. We just kept putting her in more gold and more silver throughout her rise to power, and then we downsized all of that a little in the final third of the film, when she experiences her downturn back to a kind of modesty and she moves to Château de Malmaison.

Did Vanessa have any specific input regarding her costumes?

Yates: She sadly had no real input, because we originally made them for Jodie Comer, but then she had to go and do a play [Prima Facie] — which she triumphed with, I do have to say. Vanessa did have quite strong feelings about her jewelry, though. She didn't want to use too much. She stuck mainly to a lot of necklaces and chokers, probably because they weren't too heavy [Laughs]. But she has a very lovely, almost swan-like neck, so they suited her quite well.

This isn't the first film that either of you has made with Ridley. How have your working relationships with him evolved over the years?

Yates: There's a huge amount of shorthand between Ridley and me now, which really does help. He'll say, "Remember that scene in Kingdom of Heaven?" And I'll go, "Yes, I know exactly what you mean." I know exactly what kind of cloak or costume he's referring to when he says that, which is absolutely great.

Crossman: I don't know if there's a lot of the same shorthand between us. But I do remember when I first worked with Janty on Kingdom of Heaven, I was really astonished by the way Ridley would just grab a piece of paper and do a sketch of what he wants. He'll give you a little sketch of the specific shape he wants a helmet to have and that kind of thing. I do find that to be really nice. He's very visual, so you always completely understand what he's after. He's just one of those people who communicates those ideas very well, and he tends to stick to his ideas. He's pretty consistent, so you always understand what you're doing. Hopefully, that allows you to be able to do the best version of what you're meant to. I really love it when he just doodles something and then gives it to you.

Yates: He's very collaborative.

Do you think it's his collaborative spirit that makes so many actors and crew members want to keep working with him over and over again?

Yates: It's everything. Absolutely everything. As David said, he's incredibly creative. He creates his own storyboards way before we start shooting, so you always know exactly what scene you're doing on any given day and where he's going to put the camera and shoot from. Occasionally, you'll still be worried about the weather, but even that doesn't really matter, because you already know how he's going to shoot each scene. His storyboards are legendary, and he's very fast because he always uses 8 to 10 cameras and he usually only does two or three takes. His process has gotten shorter and shorter over the years, in fact. He just works so fast.

Crossman: You also feel like you're making a real film with Ridley. There's a real energy on his sets, and the nice thing is that you always know his word is final. I've done lots of movies over the years where I've found myself going through various producers and various opinions, but with Ridley, it's Ridley's opinion and that's what counts. That's it. It's great to have that kind of single-mindedness at the front of it all. It makes you feel like you're working on a substantial, proper epic. His films have this real energy and speed to them. You're always kind of trying to keep up, and it's just terrific.

https://aframe.oscars.org/news/post/janty-yates-david-crossman-napoleon-interview





𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯

New VFX reel for Napoleon just dropped from the talented folks at Free Folk Studios.

Note the subtle use of "invisible" visual effects. CGI done right:


Ingwar

I'm guessing they will be involved in Gladiator 2.

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯

Quote from: Ingwar on Mar 03, 2024, 09:42:45 PMI'm guessing they will be involved in Gladiator 2.

I'm guessing every single VFX house on the planet would be involved with Gladiator II.   ;D


𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯

According to World of Reel, Apple Films currently has no plans to release the 4+ hour Napoleon Director's Cut.

This comes as quite a disappointment because Scott described the longer cut as "fantastic".

#ReleaseTheScottCut

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/4/1/apple-has-no-plans-to-release-ridley-scotts-4-hour-napoleon-directors-cut

No word on a physical release either.

Ingwar

QuoteIn all seriousness, I've asked around about the status of the director's cut and was told that this 4-hour version of "Napoleon" would "not be made available any time soon," and that Apple currently has "no plans" to release it. Disappointing news.

Well, World of Reel intel is questionable. Who did he ask around? :) They don't even know how to make proper research as they still think that Scott is going to adapt Wraiths of the Broken Land. Time will tell.

Smilion

Quote from: Ingwar on Apr 02, 2024, 09:56:02 AM
QuoteIn all seriousness, I've asked around about the status of the director's cut and was told that this 4-hour version of "Napoleon" would "not be made available any time soon," and that Apple currently has "no plans" to release it. Disappointing news.

Well, World of Reel intel is questionable. Who did he ask around? :) They don't even know how to make proper research as they still think that Scott is going to adapt Wraiths of the Broken Land. Time will tell.

So, Ingwar what do you know about Ridley's western project? If it's not Wraiths, what is it??  :D

Nightmare Asylum

Quote from: Smilion on Apr 02, 2024, 12:11:24 PM
Quote from: Ingwar on Apr 02, 2024, 09:56:02 AM
QuoteIn all seriousness, I've asked around about the status of the director's cut and was told that this 4-hour version of "Napoleon" would "not be made available any time soon," and that Apple currently has "no plans" to release it. Disappointing news.

Well, World of Reel intel is questionable. Who did he ask around? :) They don't even know how to make proper research as they still think that Scott is going to adapt Wraiths of the Broken Land. Time will tell.

So, Ingwar what do you know about Ridley's western project? If it's not Wraiths, what is it??  :D

What little we know has been collected in this thread. It's centered around an Indigenous woman who becomes infected with measles, and it is, in Ridley's own words, "f**king savage."


Ingwar

Yeah, and hence it is not Wraiths of the Broken Land which I have read.

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