Ella & John – the Leisure Seeker: Virzì’s film post-produced by EDI Italian digital effects is released in Italy

Milan, January 18 2018 – EDI Effetti Digitali Italiani, a post-production and visual effects company for cinema and advertising, worked on the post-production of Ella & John – The Leisure Seeker, the on-the-road film by Paolo Virzì due out today in Italian cinemas.

The film, shot in HDR (High Dynamic Range), won the Leoncino d’Oro Agis Scuola 2017 award at the Venice Film Festival and stars Ella (Helen Mirren) and John (Donald Sutherland), an elderly couple with health who decides to travel across America aboard an old camper, The Leisure Seeker, to ‘escape’ the medical treatment they both have to undergo. The journey will lead them to discover places changed from what they remembered and to retrace their love story between funny moments and some worries.

EDI’s intervention was significant: the Italian company worked on about a hundred shots in camera car and set extensions, of which over sixty with the camper in motion and about thirty with the vehicle stationary. The camper was filmed in the studio and only later were the backgrounds and reflections of the American roads that the two protagonists travel on in the film added. The post-production company also made other effects, adding smoke from the camper’s exhausts, minor changes to road signs and cleaning work. The post-production work began in November 2016 and ended in February 2017, all the camera car shots took a month and a half to complete. EDI participated in the project for the first time in collaboration with the Chromatica visual effects laboratory, with which it divided the processes and then subsequently integrated them in order to homogenize the final result for a total of twenty minutes for the car camera scenes only .

Francesco Grisi, founding partner of EDI, says: “First of all we are proud to have taken part in this work which is the first American film by a successful Italian director, such as Virzì. Furthermore, the satisfaction of having played an incisive role is great, thanks to the post-production part which was strategic for the making of the film. The excellent result of the film demonstrates the quality of the work done and moreover is the result of great teamwork. For this we would like to thank Paolo Virzì for this opportunity, the director of photography, Luca Bigazzi, and all the producers of Indiana Production”.