A lot of handheld, a lot of crane and dolly work,
so the camera's always moving through space.
I'll look up and I'll find cameras that are, like, all over the place,
where I never knew that they were.
I mean, there's... those guys shoot with, like, 6, 7, 8 cameras at a time.
I've never done a movie like that.
I mean, there's probably a camera arthroscopically in me right now.
Very seldom you see a set-up that I produce
which doesn't have at least three cameras.
Some directors don't like it.
David has embraced that, and he is really using it in the most productive manner.
- Shoot him! - Go ahead, Blade.
Show me what you're made of.
Aah!
Even though Gabby has all these cameras,
most of the time, the cameras are not in each other's shots.
That's a miracle, especially when you're shooting 270 degrees around something.
Uh, how... how are they doing that?
Jessica did all of her own archery work in the film,
and we needed her to fire an arrow, uh, towards the camera,
and in order to protect the crew and the camera,
we had everything walled off with Plexiglas,
and... so that everyone would be safe,
and the only thing that wasn't walled off was a little two by two square
directly in front of the lens of the camera.
She was firing from about 40 feet away,
and also, from about 50 feet up in the air.
And she'd been practicing so well, she hit a complete bull's eye
and the arrow imbedded itself about six inches into the camera,
went through the lens, and ended up destroying about a $300,000 camera.
We ended up destroying quite a few cameras over the course of the film...
...which I guess isn't really a badge of honor,
but, uh, these things happen sometimes.
We got our insurance worth for the cameras of the film.
It's a really powerful kind of European look.
I'm not sure if I'm speaking out of my ass, but...
There is this unifying common thread
that goes in 1, 2, and this one, and that's Wes... that's Blade.
He's so distinctive in his look and his bearing.
And that doesn't change.
Nice.
There are a number of cameos, mostly from crew members, in the film.
The most prominent one is Gabriel Beristain, my director of photography.
Kind of an inside joke... the fact that he's director of photography.
We gave him an eye patch.
At the end of the film, one of the medical examiners
is Chris Gorak, our production designer.
Script supervisor Janet Munro is also one of the medical examiners.
Lynn Harris, one of our producers,
ended up standing in for Parker Posey's shadow.
Good luck, Lynn.
Her shadow wouldn't appear on the wall in the way things were lit,
when she had to synchronize her movements to what Parker was doing.
What the hell are you doing here?
I made a cameo in a scene that was ultimately cut from the theatrical version.
Since I was pushing all my actors to do all these crazy stunts,
I thought it was fair to try it myself a few times.
Ultimately, we cut the scene not because of my performance,
but I certainly wasn't, you know... the scene just didn't work for the film.
I was having a meeting one day with my production designer
and my director of photography,
and one of the things that we were talking about is the fact that most major cities
have an official or unofficial secondary language.
We never stated where this city was,
and we just thought it'd be interesting to have a secondary language.
It was either Gabby or Chris suggested that we use Esperanto,
a universal language that was created around the turn of the century.
The idea was we'll be this universal language,
and everyone will speak it in the world,
and we'll pull elements from English and French and Spanish.
It never really took off.
I said, "Yes, absolutely. Let's use Esperanto."
So all of the signage that appears in the movie
will appear in English, and then beneath that, in Esperanto.
Also, I decided we would have this scene
in which Whistler is actually speaking in Esperanto to the news vendor.
One of the funniest things I've ever seen was Kris Kristofferson in his trailer
in his Whistler get-up,
spending hours repeating these Esperanto lines over and over again.
He was so concerned that he'd get them right.
And it was really endearing.
There was a film made that was all in Esperanto,
and it starred William Shatner.
It's called The Incubus.
I just insisted, for completion's sake, that we have that.
It's just a little kind of Easter egg, I guess, for the audiences.
On my first day of shooting, the entire crew were wearing temporary tattoos
that were a cartoon representation of me
showing my own tattoos, and it said, "Got blood?" on my chest.
I think it was instigated by one of our producers... Lynn Harris,
and Chris Gorak, our production designer.
Bizarre terminology.
Ash is what remains of the vampire once they've been destroyed.
It's an exciting idea because your last moment is this implosion
or explosion of fire and chaos.
We have a wide assortment of ass-kickery for your viewing pleasure today.
Mega damage.
They work so hard on making themselves proficient in their craft of ass-kickery.
There was lots of ass-kickery in this movie.
Lots of ass-kickery.
The weapon that the Nightstalkers are developing is a biological weapon.
For the last year, I've been working with synthesized DNA
in order to create an artificial virus targeted specifically at vampires.
We're calling it DayStar.
It's a weapon that could be used only against Drake.
If he can get it into Drake,
he could then spread it to every other vampire in the planet.
A Daywalker has the ability to walk in daylight.
It's a human being, um, you know. Is it a human being?
The person who is a vampire but who has the ability to go out in the daytime
and handle the UV rays of the sun.
There are only two Daywalkers that exist on planet Earth.
One is Blade, and also Drake, the Dracula character.
The familiar is a human that works for the vampires.
You're one of them.
A familiar is anyone that works with the vampires,
that has high hopes to become a vampire.
If you're a good familiar, you'll get bitten, and that's their goal.
Aah!
The Nightstalkers are, uh, a gang of gremlins.
They're a gang of hooligans, a mess of mooks,
they're a bunch of kids.
The Nightstalkers are a kind of a guerilla band.
The Nightstalkers are a group of vampire hunters.
People who kill vampires professionally... I'm getting a call.
Sundogs are a special bullet that Hannibal King designed
for hunting vampires, and they're bullets that let out a burst of UV light,
which actually, has them sort of implode from the inside.
Holy shit.
Blade was one of the first movies to do that Matrix style
of bullets flying through the air.
I remember seeing Blade, the first installment,
which was made a year before Matrix was released,
and they did these crazy... the bullets flying by.
You know, Stephen Dorff's character.
And I just thought it was so, so amazing.
Anyway, you do that now and they say, "That's a Matrix rip-off."
No. It's a Blade rip-off.
Designing the weapons for the Blade pictures is of some critical importance
because a certain amount of the fan base
responds to Wesley's use of these amazing vampire-killing weapons.
I wanted some kind of new bladed weapon for Blade to use.
It needed to be something interesting and something new.
We did add this chain weapon which is a very aggressive whipping short sword
that has a... a blade that ejects out with this silver chain.
The way that I approached this was to meet with David
to look over the pages in the script,
and then take those ideas and create a technology look
that was believable, but still had a science fiction aesthetic,
but a reality aesthetic to this techno-horror movie.
The creative process of developing the various designs with David
is really pretty straightforward.
He describes something in the script,
and it... it is somewhat vague because it's the initial idea.
Then I present him with an idea like maybe it could unfold.
UV Arc.
Whoa. Sorry.
Ryan, Jess... they're handling big weapons.
They gotta look like they've been doing this for the better part of their lives.
This bad boy is half as hot as the sun.
It can cut through vampires like a knife through butter.
The idea in the very first draft that I read was
that it's sort of like a cheese slicer.
Weapons management and just attitude.
I just go... and you're gone.
Well, I was looking at real weapons that the military are developing.
I added this idea of a... like a little CD ROM drive.
Electronic pistol.
David loved it, so he actually incorporated it into the script,
and Hannibal King records his shooting, his death score with the vampires.
Hedges. Super-size me, sweetheart.
One of the coolest one is the mud flap girl shotgun.
It's a modified version of the Army's objective individual combat weapon.
And it's like a big modified shotgun.
It will shoot three different types of ammunition...
missiles, sundogs, which are bullets with UV detonators inside.
When they enter a vampire, they actually let out a... a burst of UV light,
which actually has them sort of implode from the inside.
It's a really disgusting thing to watch,
watching somebody implode from the inside.
He'll also shoot stakes... these things right here.
Basically, whatever gets you hard, this puppy'll pump 'em out.
I have a seven-shooter revolver.
I have a lot of toys.
A knife that comes out of the tip of her boot.
A special compound bow.
It's juiced up to a point that it can just... just, you know, go right through
almost... almost everything, including a bullet-proof vest,
which is really cool.
I just feel like when they put me in all the wardrobe,
there's just a gun everywhere.
You know, I... I get out of the shower in the morning,
and guns are falling out of body parts.
Can we just go right ahead and sign you up
for one of our secret Nightstalker decoder rings?
¡Uhh!
You have to find things outside of just the normal kicks and punches.
There's only so many ways you're gonna kick and punch.
The challenging part is to come to this project with new and innovative things
and things you haven't seen before.
You'll see an athlete in, like, track or something do something,
you go, "Wow, that's cool.
I can turn that into a fighting move and use that in something.
We actually design some of the stunts
or some of the stunts the director has in mind.
There's a lot more straight action in this film,
going back to very real, gritty practical action which is fun and exciting
and always a challenge.
We are completely going back to old school, old-fashioned fighting techniques.
Like street fighting.
I love working with Wes. I worked with Wes on Blade 1.
B Marker.
He is a great actor, but he is an excellent martial artist.
Sometimes people study martial arts and go be in one particular style,
and so they can't look outside of that style to learn something else,
but some people you find are able to cross those lines
and go and explore other places.
Wes is one of those guys.
Wes has cadences and things that he does that nobody else does.
He's a pretty athletic individual.
And he's capable of doing a lot of his own stunts.
However, insurance comes in,
the company says, "No, we can't let him do that."
So in comes Clay.
The line between using an actor and a stunt double comes
when the risk that's involved is too great for the actor.
Like the swords, for instance.
We sort of take a stunt and look at it
as "Okay, well, this is too much risk for them to take,
when we could shoot it from a different angle and use a double."
We really don't allow them to do anything that's gonna be too dangerous for them.
Clay's a pretty amazing martial artist himself.
He has to learn how to move like Wes, though,
which is very difficult.
Wesley's incredible with rhythm.
It's so interesting to watch and no... nobody else has it...
nobody else in the industry.
I tried my darnedest to mimic this, and I do my best,
but he's... he's really good at making the fights and the stunts look interesting
because of the beats that he takes.
He plays an amazingly talented guy.
I think he continues to surprise us all with the stuff he pulls off.
These stunt guys are such pros.
I mean, they've been doing this their whole life.
They just really make the actors look great.
When you have a good stuntman, he's making me look really good.
Most times, people don't look at, well, how should that character fight?
And the character's fighting should match the character.
The way we had made Ryan's character, when he fights,
it was haymakers and good old gritty knees and elbows and stuff like that.
With Jessica, we had a lot of stunt guys
who were pretty impressed with her up there.
All of the fighting in Phoenix Towers, I was really happy with.
We had Triple H, so we made sure that some of his signature moves
were put in there, and he did do his own stuff.
We worked closed in hand with the effects department
to try and make sure that things are done on a safe and friendly level.
I'm in charge of all the practical physical effects that happen in front of the camera.
What we're trying to do is keep a lot of that look being physical and being real
so people aren't just acting with imaginary backgrounds.
We jumped a car out of the back of a... a semi truck.
We had to sit down with Clay and work out the dynamics
of how we could do it, you know?
Is it something we could actually do as a stunt?
Could we actually have somebody drive this car?
That's the sort of stuff that we have to kind of sit down and engineer and figure out.
And then, could we actually have somebody drive this car?
Was it physically possible to do?
One of my favorite things to do in the business
is driving and sliding cars around,
so when the script called for, you know, Blade to do some fancy driving,
I got really excited about, you know, getting behind the wheel again.
That's a shot that hasn't really been done that way.
The location where we filmed Whistler's hideout was a boathouse
that was a historic landmark.
There were a series of explosions.
There were over 40 of them when all was counted.
Shockingly, we didn't do any real damage to the boathouse.
Our pyrotechnic guys absolutely knew what they were doing
and did an amazing job.
It's a collaborative kind of effort.
We're all here to make a great project.
Aah!
...sunlight, right? - What about crosses?
Do they still work, Wilson, in this day and age?
Put the movie together so that it tells the story
in the best possible way.
I mean, that's what we are. We're storytellers.
It's a good point.
What about garlic? Does that work on a Hindu vampire?
We start getting dailies, which ideally, you look at with the director.
I wanna restore that, but at the very beginning of that diatribe...
I then take what the intent of the scene as I understand it
from the script, as I understand it from the director...
Can I see the start of the long version again?
...and I plunge right in and start cutting the scenes as they come in,
and of course, the film is shot out of order.
You use the script as the basis
for figuring out how to cut that particular scene.
I suppose next you're gonna be telling us that Bigfoot's in on the conspiracy, too.
We never lose sight of the character.
Maybe you could give us some few... some pointers.
- Yeah. - Let me go back. Um...
If you have to stop the action for 2/10 of a second
so that you can get a character moment in, you do it.
You don't just go...
cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut.
Blade realizes that there's another character named Whistler
who has come on the scene.
Whistler's daughter.
Originally, it wasn't written and staged to happen this way.
This shot here of Ryan saying "Whistler"
was shot several weeks after they shot the scene...
...and it allowed us to have him yell, "Whistler..."
Whistler!
...at a different point in the scene
where we were able to intensify the dramatic realization
that Wesley hears this name "Whistler"
which has been very important to him.
And this introduces us officially to Abby.
This way!
The process of shaping a movie affects enormously
how the audience perceives the story
and how they come to understand the characters.
Here's an example of the editing process.
In this scene, Blade shoots the character Gedge with a silver stake
because Blade thinks Gedge is a vampire.
This is a great shot of Wesley Snipes displayed, walking to Gedge.
It takes a little long, though, for Blade to get to Gedge.
And then we see Blade do something, but we can't tell what it is he does.
We need to see more, but remember this spotty movement that Blade makes.
We're gonna use it.
Now, here's a wide shot that was filmed with another camera
at the same time as the medium shot.
It shows everything in terms of the characters and geography,
but I can't use this shot until the first camera gets out of the frame.
When I cut from the medium to the wide,
I can shorten the walk and show what Blade is doing.
The wide shot gives us enough information
so we understand what's happening,
but the move Blade makes could be better.
Here's another shot where Wesley's move is cool,
and we see him kick the gun away much more clearly.
And as the camera moves in closer, we see Gedge with a stake.
It's a great shot.
And it tells the whole story.
Remember that body effort move?
When I use it with the kicking shot, it now completely makes sense.
Mmm.
Ouch.
Now let's watch the rest of the scene in the wide shot.
Staked you with silver.
Why aren't you ash?
Why aren't you smarter?
Not a vampire, dumb shit!
Set your sorry ass up.
Yes, we see everything that happens,
but we're missing the great character moments the actors are giving us.
We need to see those.
As an example, the scene reaches a point
where two things are happening at the same thing.
Gedge dies as the police helicopter with its searchlight arrives.
We don't see the exact moment when Gedge dies,
because I cut to Wesley's face as the light hits it.
It's more powerful graphically not to show Gedge's moment of death.
Blade realizes he's been had and his reaction is terrific and stoic,
something we could not see in the wide shot.
This is what editing does for a movie.
It shows the audience the impact of the action and geography of the story,
and with strong drama, the important moments in an actor's performance.
Let's watch the scene now, edited almost as it is in the movie.
Ouch.
Staked you with silver.
Why aren't you ash?
Why aren't you smarter?
Not a vampire, dumb shit!
Set your sorry ass up.
Damn.
In terms of the perception of the Dracula character,
when we meet him, the way it was originally shot,
we were holding off his transformation.
He didn't come across as being really threatening.
We decided to introduce him as a scarier character earlier on,
so we re-shot a scene and changed the introduction of his character
so that we got a glimpse.
It was capable of being very nasty.
You shouldn't have woken me.
Both of my editors, Howard and Conrad,
sometimes would come back with something
that was quite different than what I was envisioning,
but I think if I had done the opposite,
if I had told them, "Cut it like this," we never would've seen that version,
and because of that, we were able to go into some directions
that were kind of unexpected.
I... I like to work that way with my crew.
I like to get their unfettered opinion sometimes,
and sometimes, you'll get a very pleasant surprise.
Ready to die?
I was born ready, motherfucker.
There was one particular scene that Wesley was supposed to be in
that he wasn't in.
He wasn't available to us that day,
and Conrad, of his own accord,
took some footage from an entirely different scene
and just cut it in, and it worked perfectly.
And everyone was shocked.
It was as if Wesley had been in the scene.
The audience will never be able to tell.
- Silver hollow points. - Done.
It was amazing.
Sometimes, the scariest monster of all...
is the one in the mirror.
Definitely.
Gabby shot this brilliantly,
using multiple cameras, and not just two or three cameras.
He often was shooting not just the action sequences,
often the dialogue sequences as well, with four, five, six cameras or more
for some of the major action sequences.
A happy challenge is to take this very rich visual spatial movement
of these various cameras and connect a series of shots
that really maximize the impact of all these individual pieces.
Right there!
We could cut any of these scenes a number of different ways
with a number of variations that would be equally valid.
There's always one way that is a little bit better than any other.
Telling the story, getting across the character,
making the action play as strongly as it could,
that really was the challenge.
And throw.
Uhh!
There's a certain number of fantastical elements
that come with a Blade film that need digital help.
Aah!
There's ashings, which is the way vampires die.
The ashing shots take quite a bit of time
because there's so many different levels of production that go into it.
David decides what the action is and how it's covered,
but it all starts with photographing the real stunt guy.
We take it into our post facility
and we will match move the actual actor,
tracking his arm motion, his leg motion,
which gives us a digital model... our Cyberscan.
So now we're replacing the real actor
as we start to disintegrate him with this model.
There are some shots that, uh, you know, at any given time,
might have up to, like, 8, 9 people working on the shot at once.
I'm putting in up to seven different layers
just for the body of the guy ashing alone.
We just kept adding layers until we thought it looked right.
There's skeletal layers,
and then there's dust, there's smoke.
The layer just underneath the skin before we get to the bits of bone...
what we called "ashman"...
gives the impression that there's that layer of bloody skin underneath him.
Once all these elements are generated in the 3D world,
they're handed off to a compositor who will put them all together
and render out the final shot.
Aah!
David's script and David's mind is how can we raise the bar?
How can we one-up the last movie?
- Aah! - King!
King's gun, called the sundog, fires UV bullets
which explode from the inside of a vampire,
so now we have to disintegrate them from the inside out.
Aah!
Probably the best sundog action is
the introduction of Ryan's character into the film.
All of a sudden, a security guard... half-ashed...
comes smashing through the mirror.
We put, like, a sphere inside him that emanates strobe-like light.
As those puncture through, his bone bits are exploding off of him.
It's combining some of the same elements of deterioration,
but we're trying to effectively show that it's from the inside out.
We worked on that ashing the longest.
We started that first, and we finished that last.
We ashed more people than the previous films combined.
We just kept ashing.
A great shot in the film, uh, I think, that everyone will like is
a big, wide, dramatic crane-down of what we call the blood farm shot.
This is our big establishing shot of the bodies in the bags.
We pre-vised a shot.
Big camera move craning down,
which first, we weren't sure how we were gonna accomplish the move,
'cause it required 12 layers of bodies.
And of course, the art department was only building two layers.
Production had put together two or three layers of bodies,
but in the shot, it was supposed to look like there was an endless sea of them.
To get a shot that started so high up, ended so low,
and was kinda going from screen right to left at the same time,
we brought in a rig that was motion control.
It's a process by which a programmed camera head or dolly is brought in
so that whatever the camera does, we can repeat exact background plates.
We started with the two layers, and every layer had to have a green screen behind it,
then move it back, shoot it again, move it back, shoot it again,
and so forth.
We got in there at, like, 5:00 in the morning
on a freezing set in the middle of winter in Vancouver.
No lights, nothing.
Spent, you know, a good eight hours putting this thing together.
Um, and in motion control, it was tough to do, but it came out really, really well.
A lot of the shots we got, we could not have gotten without motion control...
just the sheer ability to repeat complex camera moves.
There's a neat shot where David wanted Blade to make an escape
out of the police station, but we used the real actors on green screen
and shot them with motion control.
If you can capture it in camera via motion control photography, green-screen work,
various plate photography, and composite it together,
well, you have reality.
When we went to the screening room to look at the visual effects shots,
David was much more often pleased than displeased.
Music can have an enormous effect on what happens emotionally with a scene.
Aah!
Uhh!
We've never really duplicated ourselves.
And this movie, it's kind of its own beast, and it had its own specific needs.
The Blade experience is pretty specific.
They're kinda street.
They're kinda sexy.
He's an action hero, but he's a black action hero.
Wes has a certain kind of way of moving and just being in front of the camera.
It's just really cool and really spare, so you want the music to reflect that.
Blade is quite a twisted character.
He's a hero, but yet tragic.
He's half-human, half-vampire, so I think musically,
to find something that fits him I think is quite challenging.
In the previous Blades, always had a hard techno sound...
very, very strong good music...
but to me, it never really gave the urban of Blade.
'Cause Blade's a tough motherfucker, you know what I'm saying?
What makes him such a good hero is that urban toughness that comes out
in some of the scenes, so my approach was that
maybe see if I could find a few tunes or a few things
that could, you know, compliment that element of it
that hasn't been maybe discovered by other composers of the previous films.
I wanted the RZA's sensibilities interwoven throughout the soundtrack
and throughout the traditional score.
This is just a collaboration, you know what I mean?
It was sort of halfway in between techno or urban,
maybe a more traditional orchestral score.
For the traditional score, we found a young composer named Ramin Djawadi,
who worked with Hans Zimmer, who is a very well known composer.
He was young and eager and wanted to explore
and he really liked the idea of working hand in hand with the RZA.
The hard part is to incorporate orchestra in modern electronics.
The orchestra starts to sound small,
so the trick was to make the combination work.
We have two really willing participants in what is kind of an experiment.
It's a very unusual score, but I think it suits the film in a good way.
Doing the soundtrack this way has definitely been an experiment
because you... you have two experts in very different fields of music.
Ramin who's super smart, killer composer,
and I was able to kind of learn a few things from him,
as well as bring my own flavor into it and institute my own ideas.
Aah!
I see you alone, surrounded by enemies.
You show a rough cut of the scene to your composers,
they come up with some ideas,
you might then change the cut a little bit based on what they came up with.
- It can be quite difficult. - Catch!
What I usually do is I play it over and over and then ideas usually come.
I had a family once.
David, you know, wasn't too hard on me,
but he definitely let me know what he liked and what he didn't like.
He wasn't shy to say, "That's not working."
A vampire.
Just finding that right tone,
finding the... the Bladeness of the music.
At the same time, he gave us freedom.
Because RZA is working so closely with Ramin,
it should really feel like the whole thing is one experience.
It's a give and take, it's back and forth.
This is a good example of RZA and I working together.
RZA had worked through the entire cue already.
He gave this to me and just said, "See what you can add to this
because it's a long cue."
But he gave me this all split out... the drums and vocals all separate.
So the beginning I actually kept pretty much untouched.
When he runs over the cars...
...he wanted some orchestral stingers.
That's a breakdown that I added.
I basically pulled out the percussion and just had an orchestral swell.
The breakdown.
Putting it all together sounds like this then.
This is a... a good movie moment.
David always was asking for more organic sounds,
so then what is there? Of course, there's guitar and bass.
So these are actually all guitars, just very processed.
Don't do that.
This one has the most memorable themes.
There's a theme for Blade, a theme for Drake,
and they're just memorable.
David really wanted to bring out the emotion in Blade
and the complexity of the character.
A really good score will work very subtly
and will operate on the audience's emotions without them even realizing that.
Conversely, a bad score can really kill a film.
I really love what we call Abigail's theme.
I personally saw this theme more as our global emotional theme.
Sometimes there's just a scene that you can't crack... you can't figure it out.
We tried stuff, we've thrown it out.
Do you wanna talk to him about that little...
It's so good, though.
I want part of it to be in the body of the film,
so that even when it comes back in the end credits...
Mm-hmm.
...it's familiar. Do you know what I mean?
And then you can hear the whole tune, even just a few bars of it somewhere.
Sometime it's a tug of war.
That part where it's going...
Yet it still has strut. That... that part. The...
Right.
We'd taken some wrong turns along the way,
and we double back, rework.
RZA took a stab, Ramin took a stab,
and you're just going, "Why can't we get this right?
We can't find the sweet spot.
We can't find this sort of one theme.
That right feel.
E, F, F sharp.
Especially if you up all weekend
and you come with this great piece of music
and you play it, and it's like... mm-mmm.
You're, like mmm!
It's one of those that we're still wrestling with.
But, you know, you go back to the drawing board.
It's at the 11th hour, we've got everything else done,
we still can't figure out what we're gonna do in this one scene.
We'll figure it out. I'm sure we'll be okay.
But that... it just happens that way sometimes.
But hopefully we get it right more than we get it wrong.
We're up in this church, in this holistic university
in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
Ramin composed using a synthesizer and sampled instruments,
and now we're laying in the real ones.
Recording different sections, we mainly do it for control purposes.
We can, in the mix, go back and simply push the brass more or the strings more.
My music is being played by an orchestra.
People in my neighborhood never would expect no shit like that.
They think that we too cool to listen to classical,
or we too cool to play an instrument.
I'm stuck on these 88 keys.
I'm not able to pick up a brass,
but I'm able to pull up a parameter on my keyboard,
and I'm able to play a brass line,
I'm able to play a flute line or a string line.
I would love to be a violinist, but I don't have that talent.
But fortunately, modern technology has stuck in all these synthesizers,
and you could just basically vibe in.
When you take two or three people that maybe have slightly different sensibilities,
and if you can figure out a way to make them work together,
I think the end result can be more interesting
than what either of them would've done on their own.
Smile.
Cheese, motherfucker!
Music and sound are sort of the unsung heroes of film
because they oftentimes work on a much more subtle subliminal level.
A little help here.
The two of us put all the sound in the movie that isn't music.
Sound editors are often referred to as sound designers,
Aaron tells me some of the things to do with dialogue,
and I tell him some of the stuff to do with sound effects.
Sound editors have earned the term sound designers
because it implies there's more to it than just cutting and pasting.
It's the sound accompaniment to storytelling,
and it's also a way of transcending the limits
of what was there on the day of the shoot.
You look so distraught!
We're here at Todd-AO in Hollywood.
We're doing the final sound and music and dialogue mix.
...distraught!
It's an enormously creative part of filmmaking... sound design.
People don't realize how much sound really affects the movie-going experience.
It really can have a... a major effect.
Hey, dickface.
You seen my dog?
Have you tried the lobby?
Drake... we did a lot of work on his voice to make him a little more evil.
Tom Cruise, I got you beat.
Some very subtle things to try to give it a sense of otherworldliness.
And you'd like me to kill him, wouldn't you?
That really has to do with storytelling, in a large way.
Blade.
Ready to die?
Don't let it turn inward.
You can put heart in it.
It already has.
You can put something that can be funny or cute or really mean
or, uh, aggressive.
Aah!
I know.
In the movie, we have the virus that attacks the cells
and they engage and destroy them.
And they're terriers... eating really close.
Another example is the vampire hisses.
I thought it should be in a very aggressive... beyond human...
something that had to bite.
The thing that seemed to have the abrasiveness was ice skating scrapes.
They just have a very chiseling abrasive quality.
Welcome to the foley stage.
Of course, "foley" comes from Jack Foley,
who invented the system in the late '40s.
Previous to that, all sound effects were cut by hand.
Maybe for Blade, this'll be just right, and in fact... well, you be the judge.
A machete...
...used that way.
Sometimes what you perceive as one sound
is actually made up of five or six sounds all on top of each other.
Aah!
I would say there's probably two or three hundred individual sounds
in every big scene like that action scene.
Aah!
The only scream that I thought was a little weird...
Well, it's right on the fence... you tell me.
There's one vampire that ashes, that gets tossed over the side of the ramp,
sounds a little Wile E. Coyote, do you know the one I'm talking about?
Yeah. I... I made that note,
but I... I kind of like it because it's a little over the top.
It... it is.
It's in one way, he's kinda going...
- You know? Like that? - But that was good.
Who thought it was over the top but good?
All right, fine. We'll keep it.
That's... that's how these decisions are made.
Aah!
The first rule of foley is there are no rules.
Sometimes what we'll do is we'll do one sound on one track
and another on another track,
play them together, and when you hear them in totality,
it has the right sound.
- It's fine. - I think that's it.
We're almost done.
I get to do this for a living.
We are looking for a special look.
We wanted something really edgy, something interesting,
so creatively, we are painting.
Cinematographers in the past doing photochemically.
Photochemically, I could said, "Oh, make it bluer. Cool."
Oh, it's very cool, that image. You see, now it's cool.
Oh, let's make it very warm. Let's make it incredibly warm.
But that's it.
That's what photochemically I could do,
but nowadays, with the possibilities of working digitally,
with a digital intermediate,
Jill can separate different levels.
What we wanted to do with Blade is to give it a different look.
So I'll go back to a normal image without our color treatment.
It's really still a great look, but what we really wanted to do is focus on Blade.
What we've done is increase the contrast,
we've desaturated most of the color, but we chose to keep the red.
Now, for this chase scene, you're gonna see bright flashes of red,
which are his cape flapping around,
and then you've got high contrast, which really emphasizes the motion,
so we've created a look that really fits with this whole sequence.
Basically, the only colors that you get are the bright reds.
When I photographed this scene,
we didn't have Wesley in his light, so to speak.
My options were to actually brighten everything in order to see his face,
which will take away the mood of the corridor,
and it would not match with the rest of the scene,
or make him into a silhouette.
This is the ultimate result right here.
And I can show you the original, without any color timing.
Now, what we've created, which is still our high contrast look
that will fit in with the rest of the scene,
but we're able to just pick out Wesley's face.
That was our first day of principal photography
and we said, "I cannot believe it."
We are doing Blade: Trinity with the most wonderful blue sky day,
the most glorious day Vancouver has ever seen in 25 years.
We've done a little bit of desaturation on the characters
and a little overall contrast.
The blue sky still a little bit too blue,
even though we kind of like the colors that we're getting on the characters,
so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna separate out that blue sky
from the characters.
I'm gonna go and create a key.
All the blue is what I'm affecting here on the screen
Now I can easily dial down, without affecting the characters,
that blue sky in the background.
The Wesley looks great,
but now Jessica, being so white...
I can darken her down and maybe give her a little bit more flesh tone,
make her a little bit warmer color
and a little more pink in her cheeks kind of thing
without affecting the sky, without looking obvious.
It's a very subtle thing,
but now we're able to balance her in with the scene a little bit more.
It's for you. Here, go ahead.
Hello?
Aah!
This is the shot without the treatment,
but... like this shot here looks just a little kind of normal.
Still a nice shot, but it's a little bit more normal.
Really want it to focus on the harshness of this fight.
Now this is after we've smoothed everything out,
matching shot to shot.
And now we have our high contrast look,
but bringing out the red on their shirts.
The flashes from the swords really stand out now.
Okay, so this is all without any type of special treatment.
You can see some shots go blue here.
These are actual visual effects shots.
And here we've matched in the visual effects shots,
so now they don't seem like they're out of place.
This is a total product of the digital screen.
Well, we've had three different endings that we've tested,
and each one has different scenes
or different... different moods that are being explored.
The ending that appears on the extended version of the DVD,
Blade rises from the dead.
You get the sense that he may indeed feed on this poor woman,
and Lord only knows what will happen.
And if there were another film, perhaps then it would be the Nightstalkers
going after Blade or something like that.
Contrary to popular opinion, Blade never died in any of the endings.
There was this big rumor that Blade was going to die.
We never filmed an ending where he died,
we never scripted an ending where he died.
It's a cool gig, though. I gotta love it.
We talked about the possibility of spinning off into a Nightstalkers film
and having them go after a different kind of menace.
The legacy is continuing.
You have Wesley as Blade on one hand,
and then you have Nightstalkers on the other.
We'll see where it goes.
It's difficult for me to envision doing yet a fourth film.
I would never say never. You never know.
I would definitely be interested in doing a Nightstalkers spin-off.
Are you crazy? Are you high?
I'm having such a great time. It would be great.
I would definitely be into that.
I'm enjoying every second of this movie.
I don't think I've ever had as much fun as... as I am on this movie.
Jessie Biel and I this morning were saying that... that
we wanna do a whole movie with no dialogue
and just butt-kicking left and right and center.
I... I mean, this has been a wonderful experience and exciting,
and it's given me a chance to exploit another aspect of my creativity.
If people really like the character and want it to come back one more time,
maybe we'll encore it somehow.
I might be in a wheelchair, and my fangs will be down to here.
I'll be, like, "Come here, you vampire.
"Remember when I used to jump through the roof and the window and shoot you?"