Thus, if the actor was meant to have the earth providing bounce light from their left, on the screen on that side of their body was a giant earth image, digitally controlled and correctly aligned. Here, the actors, primarily Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, were filmed acting inside the box that had projected from it the correct environment the actor was meant to be in. The Gravity team tested a number of systems (see below), with the final solution to have a small number of sets and then a LED ‘light box’ set used for the complex zero gravity work. Then you’d cut to a close-up and they’d just be standing on a apple box wobbling around and it would work for a close-up for 10 seconds and then they’d do something else for another bit.” “They used the vomit comet where you can just about get away with a five second shot for, maybe a little bit longer. “Apollo 13 is one of the few films that has done it very well, I think,” says Webber. However, Ron Howard’s solution would not work for Alfonso Cuarón’s shooting style. Listen to the original Children of Men podcast here.įilms have tackled zero-G before, most notably on Apollo 13. Read the original Children of Men story here. With Gravity, not only was the screen time much longer, it also required vast digital sets and the added complication of zero gravity. At the time fxguide stated that “All the work is impressive and the digital baby is perhaps the finest work of its type done so far.” The work in that film was remarkable but at least the environment was real. The team then had to produce a photoreal digital child being born, again in one long continuous shot, in a small room.

Imagining Gravityįxguide first sat down with Tim Webber at the end of 2006, to discuss his VFX supervision for the birth sequence in the 2007 film Children of Men, also directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

The Third Floor London saw the two companies sharing staff, tools, skills and philosophies and an initial headquarters at Framestore’s Wells Street office. This new company is actually a joint venture between Framestore and The Third Floor LA. It was actually this collaboration that leads to the creation of The Third Floor London. The previs which was key to the film’s success was primarily done by Framestore but in partnership with The Third Floor. Additional VFX work was carried out by Nhance, with scanning and LIDAR contributions from 4DMax, additional scanning by XYZ RGB, facial scanning by Light stage and facial mocap by Mova. Rising Sun Pictures provided 17 shots, but given Cuarón’s trademark long continuous shots, those 17 shots accounted for over two and a half minutes of screentime (see more details below). In addition to Framestore’s efforts on the film, Prime Focus partnered to help with the stereo conversion, although much of the digital footage was rendered in stereo. After all, no one has seen a film that looks quite like it before.Click to listen to our fxpodcast interview with Framestore visual effects supervisor Tim Webber about how he approached the effects of Gravity. But one can’t really blame the film-makers for this minor loss of nerve. Remembering Stanley Kubrick’s use of silence in 2001: a Space Odyssey, one can’t help wondering if a quieter film, with less dialogue and a less insistent score, might not have proved even more powerful. On occasion it underscores too heavily the existential and emotional points that it makes perfectly eloquently by its images alone. On the other hand, as every Hollywood production must be, Gravity is about human agency and its characters’ personal growth. the aggregate of our joy and suffering” can be seen “on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”.

On the one hand, it provokes the same feelings of awe and humility as Nasa’s famous “Pale Blue Dot” photograph of the planet Earth, in which, in Carl Sagan’s words, “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of. And yet for all that, the real tension in Gravity is between its different senses of scale.

Gravity movie