Bruce Beresford’s “Mao’s Last Dancer” tells the story of a poor Chinese boy who becomes a member of a top American ballet troupe, and used Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) to add some extra pop and effects to a few scenes. In a talk with FXGuide, visual effects supervisor Tim Crosbie talks about how they build some of the more complex scenes and gets into a laundry list of little annoyances they had to add along the way.
There’s also a sequence at the end of the film where the audience throws streamers at the stage. When they shot it, the scene didn’t quite have the big impact they were after. So we built a bunch of CG streamers to go along with a set of practical streamers shot against black and added them into the shots. In a train shot, there were some young kids staring out of the train that was shot without glass, so we added VFX glass. Another shot with a steam train coming from middle distance to screen camera left involved a mix of three plates and getting the steam from one to another, which was pretty tricky. In the Chinese Embassy there was an exit sign we had to take out because it had English writing on it. There were also some exterior shots of an open air theatre that needed a little work, mostly colour correction and a little roto/paint work. One of these shots had a PA walking into the scene while on a mobile phone, would have been fine if he hadn’t been on the phone but seeing as this is just before the 80s we removed it.
