Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee has gone from an art-house titan to a new filmmaking technology trailblazer.
His new film “Gemini Man” was again shot in the new format of 4K high-definition, 3D and 120 frames per second, a territory few directors in the world have attempted. Lee shot his last film “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2016) this way.
However, it was his Oscar-winning film “Life of Pi,” in which a CGI tiger was created, that inspired him to create a human character completely by CGI, which is much more complicated, involving more than two years of work by over 500 top visual effects to make it happen by rendering the CGI character inch by inch.
“Gemini Man,” starring Hollywood veteran actor Will Smith, tells the story of a soon-to-retire top assassin who finds himself the target of a younger clone.
To achieve the desired photorealistic look for the clone, Lee and his team studied all the imagery and films of Smith in his younger years. “We even magnified his images 6,000 times to observe the most delicate details of his appearance. I can’t say how much I knew him personally in life, but for his face, I knew better than his mother,” the director told a press conference on Oct. 14 in Shanghai.
Source: Ang Lee pushes the envelope of filmmaking format – China.org.cn