Making Space

Framestore helps Director Alfonso Cuar n fight zero gravity while achieving his ambitious vision in outer space.

Alfonso Cuar ns blockbuster Gravity has enjoyed fantastic critical success, collecting enough stars from film reviewers to fill the galaxy it so devotedly depicts.

It is, many say, the closest thing most of us will ever get to going into space. Theres no time to think about it while youre watching the film of course, when you are immersed so deeply in the beauty and terror of space, but how were those stunning images made? By taking a film crew up 372 miles above the Earth? In fact, those mesmerizing images were planned and created in Soho, London. Its a Hollywood blockbuster made in Britain, from pre-production, through filming, to its extensive time in postproduction

I first heard about Gravity at the beginning of 2010, says Visual Effects Supervisor Tim Webber, a long-time collaborator of Cuar ns and the man he approached to help realize a film no one knew how to make, Alfonso came in and talked us through the movie for 45 minutes and it was gripping. We all came out really excited having heard it.

At that point it was unclear to what extent visual effects and Webbers team at Framestore would be needed. There was a stage initially where it was going to be made with actors in real space suits, Webber continues, they would have been hung up on wires on partial sets and we would have extended it and put in the background. In the end considerably more of it is CGI than first discussed, and in fact considerably more of it is computer generated than real.

In the majority of shots the only elements captured with a camera are the faces. The vastness of space, the Earth, the stars (all 30 million of them), the space shuttles, Hubble Telescope, the International Space Station (ISS), the copious and equally villainous fragments of debris, even the space suits: They were all made by visual effects artists at Framestore.

It was no simple process - everything had to be fastidiously planned. The first step down the three-and-a-half-year road to making Gravitys visuals was the previs, a basic animation process common to all films that blocks out the action in each scene before filming starts. But for Gravity it was anything but basic - it was meticulous.

We spent about a year planning it before we shot it. By the time we turned up on set the film was pretty much locked, says VFX Producer Charles Howell.

Webber elaborates on the need for such a detailed plan: It needed to be heavily previsd for a number of reasons, obviously technically as we needed to work out the camera moves but also because when youve got a 12-minute continuous shot and its set in space where youve got a camera that can roam absolutely anywhere and youve got people that can roam absolutely anywhere too - upside down, underneath, over the top, everywhere - the degrees of freedom are much greater. Therefore to design the shot creatively so that it worked without the benefit of editing [Cuar n is famous for his long shots] takes a lot of work, so previs was a big process.

It was lit by cinematographer Emmanuel Chivo Lubezki during this period - an unheard of move for live action, but a necessary one ahead of a very complicated shoot at Shepperton studios. Even the use of stereo 3D, so often criticized as an afterthought, was planned during previs with Stereoscopic Supervisor Chris Parks. The original script did read Gravity: A Space Adventure In 3D after all.

Sandys Cage With the previs complete, Webber and his accomplices set about creating the techniques that would help simulate micro gravity - cutting out the need for hundreds of trips in the vomit comet, the specially designed aircraft that NASA uses to provide a few seconds of near weightlessness. Both Tim and Alfonso had been up in it themselves for research, but instead chose a combination of motion-controlled cameras and light rigs.

Collaborating with Bot & Dolly Motion Control and the on-set special effects team (the masters of physical, in-camera effects as opposed to the computer-based world of visual effects), cameras were strapped to huge robotic arms and George Clooney and Sandra Bullock were put in a variety of different rigs, many newly developed for the film. Then the solution of the lightbox was hit upon and the cramped LED box known on set at Sandys cage took over a large part of the filming responsibility. In its standard configuration, the box would be a 10m cube, with huge LED panels containing almost two million lights making up its walls. The use of LEDS allowed Chivo to light the actors which much greater flexibility than traditional film lights - the different colors reflecting off the Earth, moonlight, sunlight and starlight could all be replicated.

Bullock would be strapped to a rig in the center of the box as the camera moved around her, achieving the illusion that it is she that moves. The camera could zoom in and out from any position and it would race towards her and stop dead, just centimeters from her face.

It was a highly unusual, VFX-led filming process. When I was on set with the lightbox and the robots I thought Ive never seen a setup like this, says Framestore VFX Supervisor, Rich McBride. Id just never heard of anyone doing anything like it. I knew this film was going to be groundbreaking.

We were providing motion-control moves for the rigs, but also generating a full immersive digital environment on-set using LED screens, explains CG Supervisor Chris Lawrence. Having to control that in real time was an interesting challenge! I dont think theres great precedent of that being done before on a movie. At the time we did it I dont think anyone had done it the way we had with a box that completely surrounds an actor and having to bring live CG elements in.

Cuar n himself has said that he sees the technique as the nex

LINK:	http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/In-Focus/2013/Making-Space.aspx...
	See more stories from cwg

Most recent headlines