Justin Lin's Star Trek Beyond will be released in theaters in a few months, and many of us are excited to see how the Fast & Furious filmmaker's brilliant style of direction would be different from Abrams' two Trek movies before it.
Entertainment writer Logan Hill taked to the Sitting Arond Talking Moives podcast about his recent visit into the Star Trek Beyond editing offices, where he met with Justin Lin and saw some material the editing team is working on for the upcoming film.
The most interesting part was how much time Lin is putting into Star Trek Beyond, spending most of every weekday on the film. (One clarification in the context of the interview: "Turning projects around quickly," refers to the compressed production timeline).
Justin Lin works really fast. He's got a reputation in the business [as a director] who can turn massive projects around very, very quickly. He works from nine in the morning to two AM in the [editing] office, five days a week. Dude doesn't sleep.
I've talked to actors who've been on set with him and they said that he would show up on set, he'd film all day – and at nine o'clock everybody'd go out to dinner, [but Lin] would go into the editing bay and sleep. He's one of these guys that does REM cycle sleep, so he either sleeps an hour and a half or three hours a night, never more when he's on set.
He'd be editing [that day's] sequences every night to make sure he got what he needed… He would stay up all night editing because if you don't get [any needed] stuff the next day - with a cast like that that's so big and has so many missing parts - you miss it.
Hill also described the still-in-progress visual effects:
[Lin] likes to have a lot of things going on, so he splits his team up and have [editors] in three or four different rooms working on different scene visually; three or four rooms working on the sound... they had a rough cut set.
He is such a meticulous guy that he is getting in there, looking at the thrusters on the back of the Enterprise and saying, "The housing on that thruster looks too old-fashioned, it's too rigid, can we smooth it out?"
I also saw some stuff that was in the early stages of designing ships and things. Like, when you'd see those big scenes of a city, they design every single ship, saying things like, "Oh, that's not going to contrast great, that grey ship isn't going to [show] against the grey background. Let's change the color."
…
You know, any time you go to a set like this, obviously they're trying to show their best stuff, since you're only there for a day, so I'm not seeing the messiest [unfinished effects].
I saw some stuff that was nearly finished, that looked spectacular.
You can check out the full interview here.
Star Trek Beyond will be released on July 22, 2016. You can watch the trailer here.
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