On this film, unlike any other I’ve personally worked on, we would just spend hours a day with James. It was this incredible experience of really watching – doing dailies for hours sometimes, looking at the animation, seeing what’s working and what’s not, looking at every aspect and development of the things that we had to create.

The interesting part, as well, was tracking all of that. The thing about this movie is that the creative had to come first. It was the only way to achieve the work on it. Of course, I had a responsibility to the studio for the budget as well. So it was putting the creative first, and then following through with making sure that we could figure out how to do everything that was on the list with the funds that we had, which is also a fascinating and fun part of it.

VFX Voice: In addition to the director’s cut, were you also getting things like a review cut ready or a test screening cut ready for an audience to see? Can you talk about some of the challenges of each stage of finalization of a film like this?

Kimberly Locascio: Absolutely, that is probably the most challenging part, especially on these gigantic films because the shots take a minimum of 16 weeks production time. So it’s always a balance between when is it ready to actually show to an audience and who may or may not understand what they’re actually looking at. What you’re always asking yourself is, ‘Does it tell the story? Is it good enough there?’ You also don’t want to create a lot of waste. You don’t want to produce shots that are going to end up on the floor because they’re not part of the actual shot production.

You have to balance all of those things, and then come up with the best plan for each sequence. In some cases, on a movie like this, because so much was being created after the fact, it was really challenging. We had to pick a date that was the perfect sweet spot where we would have enough work that was not going to be wasted that was finished enough for everybody to be able to understand what they were looking at. There’s a lot of pressure when you have that type of deadline. I think everyone rose to meet that challenge on this movie in a wonderful way, and I think the studio was very smart and supportive about picking the right dates. Otherwise, you have the postvis that you’re using for a very small audience cut in, and that’s never going to be ideal.