![]() This use of on-set projection meant Double Negative had to create all the content ahead of production, leading to the construction of about 170 shots completely in-camera without additional post-production. The plan was not without its challenges, such as the logistics of moving two projectors - each weighing 600 pounds - and repositioning them between shots, and having to do it in 15 minutes as opposed to the couple of days suggested by the projectionists from Background Images in Los Angeles. “We found that if you stacked two of these projectors on top of each other, projecting the images onto the same area of the screen, you could get enough light from them to expose the film negative to simulate the effect of raw daylight.” When we looked into it this time, there’s a new generation of really powerful digital projectors that are designed for live performance,” says Franklin. “Projection technology has only recently got to the point where it’s flexible enough to use with our film-making process. This physical in-camera approach led to the use of on-set projection, something that had intrigued Franklin and Nolan for a while. The film’s two robots, TARS and CASE, added to what Nolan described as a “tactile sense of reality” - the feeling you could reach out and touch the spacecraft and robots - by using physical puppets controlled on set by actor Bill Irwin, who also voiced TARS. Influenced by Apollo archive footage in which you do not see wide shots of the spacecrafts, cameras were hard-mounted to the models to give the film “an almost documentary level of realism so the audience feel they are being taken on this journey”. One such aspect was the film’s spacecraft Endurance, realised through a combination of physical miniatures (from New Deal Studios in California) and full-size models to film exterior shots. ![]() “This whole approach then extended into what you might consider to be the more conventional parts of the film.” There is no limit as far as he is concerned, nothing unfilmable,” says Franklin. “Chris loves visual effects and loves using them, but he will always try to get it for real in-camera. However outlandish the ideas, there would be one constant link. To keep the film realistic, Interstellar’s Earth-based sequences used few visual effects, one of which was a dust storm, so they would contrast with Nolan’s vision of space travel, which would involve a black hole, a wormhole, planets and the tesseract - a four-dimensional space in which time is seen as a physical dimension. The journey to bring the world of Interstellar to life started at the script stage when Franklin was contacted by the film-maker and given an idea of the tasks that awaited his team - around 450 people from Double Negative would eventually work on the project. Having won an Oscar and Bafta for visual effects on Inception, Franklin and his team have been nominated again for Interstellar, which marks the fifth time he has worked with Nolan. ![]() “There was no intention of allowing the visual effects to grandstand and take over, apart from when we did want to show the awe and spectacle of the universe.” “Our aim was always to tell this extraordinary story in a very matter-of-fact and grounded way,” says Paul Franklin, visual effects supervisor. ![]() Realism is a word not often associated with science fiction blockbusters, but that was the goal for visual effects firm Double Negative on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
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