The Team Behind ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’ Discuss Adobe’s Creative Cloud Tools’ Role In its Production3 min read
Reading Time: 2 minutesOn November 3, Adobe MAX, Adobe’s annual creativity conference, saw a special screening of Terminator: Dark Fate and a post-screening panel discussion featuring director Tim Miller, editor Julian Clarke, ACE, associate editor Matt Carson, and visual effects editor Jon Carr.
During the session, they highlighted how Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools (including Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Mixamo and Substance by Adobe) helped them achieve their creative and technical goals.
Here are some quotes from the panel:
On making Dark Fate and the legacy of Terminator:
– Tim Miller: “The original Terminators were about relentless pursuit and emotion. We wanted to bring that feeling back into the current movie.”
– Tim Miller: “I want [audiences] to feel like it was a worthy continuation of Sarah’s story. And to have a good time. I wanted to make a big blockbuster movie with a ton of action and I think we delivered on that front…We wanted to add to the mythos of Terminator. Giving Linda one more shot to finish her story was worth all the pain.”
On choosing Premiere Pro and Adobe Creative Cloud:
– Tim Miller: “I’m friends with David Fincher, and he had just gotten through the process of using Premiere and working with Adobe to make it a better film editing tool…I had used Premiere when I was an editor and it wasn’t a hard sell.”
– Julian Clarke: “After we finished Deadpool, which was a third of the size of this movie in terms of what we were undertaking, we gave Adobe a bunch of homework. Adobe went to work and got Shared Projects working very well.. Even though this was a harder film, it was easier than Deadpool. That’s a testament to what Adobe has done.”
– Julian Clarke: “[Shared Projects and the collaborative workflow] is why I was excited to use Premiere. When you have this many assets, you need organization and file management, otherwise everything falls apart…I think the whole process was very efficient.”
– Jon Carr: “There were 1,900 VFX shots in the finished film. Total there were probably 2,500 to 2,600 shots. The vast majority of the shots were visual effects shots… And so it’s really important to me to have an integration with After Effects and Premiere so I can just dynamically link into After Effects from Premiere and then just start working immediately.”
On editing efficiency:
– Julian Clarke: “For a movie this size, it’s impossible to do without networking the editing. When you have 2,000 VFX shots coming in, you need people jumping in on the reels. All of the work needs to happen simultaneously. Adobe got us 90% there so we could do a movie at this size and make it work…It was a huge success.”
Check out the full Q&A panel below:
