Emerson alumni can be found working throughout the film industry in a variety of roles. This year, their work will appear in one of the summer’s most anticipated releases from one of cinema’s most distinguished voices.

Spike Lee’s latest crime joint, “Highest 2 Lowest,” premiered out of competition at Cannes on May 17 to an over five-minute standing ovation. It just so happens that Baked Studios, the boutique VFX studio that headed the visual effects work on “Highest 2 Lowest,” is crawling with Emerson talent.

The film reunites Lee with longtime collaborator Denzel Washington in the leading role and serves as a contemporary take on Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 crime drama, “High and Low.” This “reinterpretation,” as Lee describes it, moves Kurosawa’s police procedural from post-war Japan to Lee’s often-explored New York. 

Washington plays a once-legendary music mogul seeking to regain a controlling stake in his company while grappling with a ransom demand after his chauffeur and lifelong friend, Jefferey Wright, finds out his son, Elijah Wright, has been kidnapped.

Baked Studios founder, George Loucas ’04—an apt name for his field—and other Baked team members spoke with The Beacon about the film’s Cannes premiere and Baked’s role in bringing it there. 

The Baked team isn’t a stranger to working on large projects. Last year, they provided ​​ancillary VFX assistance on “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” one of the year’s biggest box office successes. However, with “Highest 2 Lowest,” Baked took on the most prominent VFX role in the film’s post-production. 

“I think this one is special to us because we’re the main vendor on it,” said Loucas. On many big-budget films, numerous visual effects companies collaborate to complete the entirety of the effects. However, the “main vendor” acts as the primary creative and logistical partner. 

“With a more traditional studio film or tentpole film, we’re one of many partners on it, usually in a more supportive role. I think what makes [“Highest 2 Lowest”] such a big deal [for us] is the fact that we are the main vendor.”

While there are always films that make a point of showing off their flashy visual effects through large-scale spectacles—last year’s “Dune: Part Two” showcased particularly immense VFX action-setpieces—the need for more subtle visual effects work is equally, if not more, prevalent in Hollywood. The subtlety in question involves visual effects that are meant to be invisible, imperceivable to the audience. “Highest 2 Lowest” contains several of these invisible effects, implemented to further Lee’s vision and fix unprecedented production problems.

“There are plenty of things that are unforeseen, and sometimes you realize it as you’re shooting it,” Loucas said. 

With a busy set schedule, productions don’t always have the time to remove things like production tents or set vehicles that might end up within the frame of the footage. If a production falls behind schedule and dusk begins to set in, threatening the loss of necessary light for planned shots, compromises must be made.

In these moments, as Loucas describes, “We just have to point the camera in that direction, and we’re just like, ‘okay, that’s unavoidable, we’re going to have to fix this later.’” 

In comes Baked. Those same production tents and vehicles can be removed digitally. With their team of artists, Baked fixes in post what can’t be fixed on set, eliminating or altering aspects of the footage.

Alongside what the VFX team already knows they’ll have to fix, Loucas describes how the post-production process will often uncover issues that went unnoticed during production. Industry-grade cameras shoot at incredibly high resolutions. Occasionally, they capture things that weren’t meant to be on screen. 

“Sometimes there are things [you only notice] in post, especially with more rigorous quality control,” said Loucas. Reflections in car mirrors, a distracting civilian, and stray boom microphones are all things that can be discovered in the footage after production has wrapped. Discoveries like these require teams like Baked to clean up what was overlooked.

Paul Pierantozzi ‘19 works at Baked as a Nuke compositor—a visual effects artist who uses the digital compositing software Nuke to combine and polish visuals. A recent addition to the Baked team, his work helped finalize the visual effects on “Highest 2 Lowest.” Pierantozzi’s recent work on the film challenges what he sees as a common misconception about visual effects.

“When people think of visual effects, they probably think about creature work, or pyro work, like explosions,” said Pierantozzi. “But the vast majority of work in a visual effects house is usually problem-solving. Fixing errors that happened on set and cleanup work.”

Adding in massive explosions or giant sandworms only occurs in select cases. Pierantozzi explained that Baked’s work on Lee’s film reflects a more typical visual effects job. For example, a large portion of Baked’s workload on “Highest 2 Lowest” was sky replacement—changing the weather from overcast to sunny. “This is the kind of stuff that if we do our jobs correctly, you’ll never notice,” said Pierantozzi. “The audience will never even be able to guess that we were there, and that is the vast majority of visual effects work.”

Pierantozzi first joined the boutique studio after reconnecting with Baked team member Cameron Target ‘18, whom he first met on the set of a Frames Per Second production, an Emerson student organization that still operates today.

Target, Baked’s VFX pipeline manager, describes how working on “Highest 2 Lowest” provided Baked with unique challenges, such as melding the various camera formats used to shoot the film. “There’s a lot of music videos within the film, and they shot those differently from the way the film was shot,” explained Target. “The way to create that separation was a huge opportunity for us to figure out some new ways of tackling different camera formats.” 

Though modest in size, Baked’s expertise in the often-overlooked side of visual effects—the subtle, invisible details most audiences never notice—allows them to take on a wide range of projects. “We’re a small house, but we’re able to have a high-end professional scale pipeline,” said Target. Alongside “Highest 2 Lowest,” Baked Studios also assisted with the visual effects on Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” which also premiered at Cannes earlier this May, and designed the most recent iteration of MGM’s famous lion opening.

For Pierantozzi, the gateway to producing solid visual effects work is familiarizing oneself with the visual language of the field: 

“I think the most important thing for a young artist or someone who wants to be in this space is really training your eye, honing your eye, and thinking about things from an artistic fundamentals perspective.”

For those who pride themselves on their knack for spotting hidden VFX, try to catch a screening of “Highest 2 Lowest” this summer.

“Highest 2 Lowest” will have a limited theatrical release in the United States on Aug. 22, followed by a global streaming debut on Apple TV+ on Sept. 5.