The Screening

Last night the cast and crew had our screening of Flags of our Fathers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theatre, in Hollywood on Wilshire. The screening started at 7:30pm, and most of us struggled through rush hour traffic to make it a mere 12 miles in an hour. I don't know how people can do it day in and day out.

The film itself is quite good, and I may be a bit jaded, but I felt detached from it as a whole, I guess because we've been working on it for a while. Most of the other films that I've been a part of, I feel the same. However, the parts that we did do, the storming of Green Beach and all the armada shots, were amazing, especially with sound. Some I hadn't seen before. The color tones for the film sequences that we worked on were quite muted, in blacks, greys, tans and olives. The visual and audio impact of these sequences was quite powerful. Many may compare this to Saving Private Ryan, which was told in a linear storyline fashion. Flags is a retrospective on the past, with snippets of the battle dispersed throughout the film. It jumps forward and backward in time quite a bit. At the end of the film during the credits, actual photos from the campaign are displayed. It's uncanny how closely our work mirrors that of the actual battle! We sat among the rotoscopers during the show, and while the credits were rolling their names, most of the theatre broke out in applause. They were definitely the unsung heroes in the vfx department, every shot on the beach was touched by a roto artist. They had an extremely tough time, but it paid out in spades. We had 35+ compers, and there more rotoscopers than that!

It's quite possible that this film will be up as an Oscar contender, but only time will tell. Rumor has it that the film projected in the theatres may have a Letters from Iwo Jima trailer at the end of the credits, so don't miss that when you go!