Made in Hollywood

The method Duke used to shoot "Gravity" is very special, which also determines that its post-production will be very different from the previous films. As early as the pre-production, he, the director, realized this.

Not to mention technical and financial issues, the first problem is time.

The film wants to be screened before the new year to qualify for the Oscar competition. There is only three months of post-production time. For such a film, the difficulty can be imagined, even John Schwarz Both Ziman and Tim Weber have persuaded Duke to give up this year's Oscar, and it will not be too late to wait until next year.

But they don't know what Duke is thinking. The reason why he rushed to make this film is for this Oscar. Unless "Black Swan" is also moved to the North American release next year, otherwise he will not change the plan.

This is obviously impossible. "Black Swan" has already held its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and will officially land in North America in October.

After the filming ended, Duke went to the home of Industrial Light and Magic and George Lucas again. The production cost of "Gravity" was also increased to 230 million US dollars, and the film had nearly two-thirds of the funds. All will be put into special effects production.

This is a commercial society, as long as you can afford the price, you can get enough people.

Industrial Light and Magic mobilized almost all available personnel to participate in the post-production of "Gravity", not only in North America, but also the branches of Industrial Light and Magic in London, India and Singapore. They mobilized A large number of manpower and digital engineers are dedicated to the most time-consuming and labor-intensive lens rendering work.

But Duke is very clear that to make a film good enough, special effects production is one aspect, and storytelling is also one aspect. "Gravity" conforms to reality, but it is not rigidly based entirely on reality.

For example, in post-production, the altitudes of many space stations and satellite orbits were properly compressed.

Since the film will use a large number of long shots, and there are many shots longer than five minutes, the editing work is relatively less cumbersome than in the past. Duke completely left the initial cut work to Mike Dawson, and he was in the special effects headquarters of Warner Studios, coordinating the special effects production work covering North America, South Asia, Europe and Southeast Asia.

The special effects production has already started before the filming started, and it has been going on during the filming process, otherwise it would be impossible to complete the production that would take several months just for rendering, and Duke has spent a lot of money to gather a large number of manpower, and many shots can be carried out at the same time deal with.

certainly. The consequence is the high production cost.

But now he has such capital, as long as the production cost does not exceed 300 million US dollars, I believe the review committee of Warner Bros. will not hesitate much.

In the entire post-production, there are many important tasks, and lens rendering is undoubtedly the most tedious one.

As Duke requested. After shooting and CG production, it is necessary to add many lens effects such as penetration, flare and chromatic aberration.

Due to time constraints, the special effects team of Industrial Light \u0026 Magic planned to use the newly developed special effects development software named 'Arnold' renderer from the very beginning. This software is powerful, but it has not been used in any previous films.

Since it is the first time to use. Faced with an unusually large workload, many people, including Duke, are still a little worried. Fortunately, it is. The Arnold renderer has a super memory management function, allowing many complex scenes to be rendered.

This is something that the Arnold renderer is good at, doing the rendering with a lot of complex geometry and doing a lot of ray tracing at the same time, due to the long hours of rendering and the enormous pressure on Duke, ILM's VFX team had to constantly Make sure that what you do is correct. If the things you make do not help the texture of the whole movie, it is undoubtedly a signboard for Industrial Light and Magic.

Moreover, Duke also asked them to use a lot of instantiation techniques to increase the complexity of the picture.

"Part of it is because it helps the viewer's sensory experience."

Duke also explained to Tim Weber, ILM's special effects supervisor on the set, to let them understand the need for this, "Because when you shoot in space, you can't shoot with the best camera, It’s also impossible to change the lens, and many things can’t be done, so those special effects lenses are used to show the feeling of shooting in space.”

According to Duke’s understanding, there will be some light leakage when shooting in space. Due to the distance of the sun and the darkness of space, if the light reflected from the earth is not shown in the shadows, the contrast will become particularly large. , larger than anything seen on Earth.

So, you need a lot of high-contrast images in movies.

How to convince the audience of the authenticity of what happened in space is quite nerve-wracking. Duke, who is generally used in space movies, cannot be used, whether it is simulation or special effects. For example, the pulsed electromagnetic radiation caused by the discharge process in the atmosphere-that is, Tiandian, which makes the distant Tiandian dull and less powerful, does not meet the expectations of movie audiences.

There are also explosions. If there is an explosion in the universe, few people know what it is like.

Therefore, during the post-production, they will not completely follow the information provided by the astronauts, and sometimes have to make an exception. For example, it often takes 50 minutes for the astronauts to go out from the space station. Such things must not be copied. When the audience sees If they are happy, the film will give them such a thing, and the consequences can be imagined.

Of course, Duke will still make the movements the same as the reality first, and there will be some exceptions, but it will always make these movements seem meaningful.

There is another job that will directly affect the success or failure of the film, and that is 3D.

Due to the craze triggered by "Avatar", many Hollywood companies are now preparing to convert their classic movies into 3D and re-release them for re-release, so as to make a lot of money.

Undoubtedly, Duke is ahead of the entire Hollywood. As early as the beginning of the year, the 3D version of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy took advantage of the upsurge of "Avatar" and earned more than 300 million US dollars in box office worldwide.

As for "Gravity", Duke decided to make it a 3D movie more to serve its story. Most of the scenes in it are floating in outer space, and the effect of using 3D is sure to be remarkable.

A long time ago, Duke confirmed that "Gravity" would be a movie combining CG and live-action shooting, but before starting shooting, he had not decided whether to shoot directly in 3D or convert to 3D in post.

Duke and John Schwartzman tried to shoot in 3D, but in practice, it was very troublesome to put bulky 3D shooting equipment in a narrow light box.

Therefore, after Duke went to Industrial Light and Magic and brought back the 3D conversion results, the crew found that, in the specific environment of space and the special shooting method of the crew, there is no difference between the real-time conversion and the direct 3D shooting. And it's actually much more efficient.

Therefore, Duke did not hesitate to abandon the plan of 3D real shooting.

But "Gravity" will definitely not be a fake 3D film. Its shooting and production methods are extremely special, which is completely different from the traditional 3D conversion.

The traditional method of converting to 3D is to convert the film to 3D during post-production, but "Gravity" is different.

As early as in the pre-production, ILM's conversion to 3D began. Duke's 3D supervisor Chris Parks has been working with ILM's related teams. He explained Duke's 3D to them in detail. Ideas are well thought out.

For example, the great contrast between the emptiness of the vast universe and the almost claustrophobic cramped space capsule.

From the very beginning, the team faced the huge challenge of ensuring that the converted 3D images would seamlessly blend with the CGI-created 3D images.

After live-action shooting, it needs to be converted into 3D. The CGI is also 3D. Both are 3D, but one is converted and the other is made by special effects.

Another point is that when doing this, they can't guarantee that this will be the picture that Duke will eventually want. The team must try their best to maintain the flexibility and creativity of the conversion process.

Not only that, when they were working, "Gravity" was not a finished film, and they worked with the crew to follow the shooting schedule. same progress.

The entire post-production is closely linked, and it is a standard team behavior. Duke is only the commander-in-chief. Many shots are processed in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and sent to India and Singapore, where the most tedious transitions are made. The work was then sent to London for processing and then back to Los Angeles for review by Duke and visual effects supervisor Tim Webb.

Duke needs to ensure that all the pictures are consistent with the environment, and make the environment more beautiful as much as possible. Of course, this requires the concerted efforts of the entire post-production team to complete.

In the final editing, the technical rigor is to make the pictures seamlessly connected, so that the audience can't see where the editing points are. Duke often considers where to edit from the perspective of 3D. The whole editing team was doing the same thing for 3D—finding that subtle cut that made it look like it wasn't edited.

There is no doubt that "Gravity" is the most complex and detailed work that Industrial Light and Magic has completed to date.

The length of the shots and the high requirements for details during the transition, Duke has achieved the ultimate under the current conditions, and even many people who have watched his completed clips believe that 3D will change the movie one day.

Thanksgiving is coming soon, and before Thanksgiving comes, Duke temporarily puts aside his work and prepares to attend the premiere of the final chapter of the "Harry Potter" series. (to be continued ~^~)

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