The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, abbreviated as NASA, is a civilian scientific research agency under the United States federal government. It is responsible for formulating and implementing the U.S. civil space program and conducting research in aerospace and space science. Its headquarters is located in Washington, D.C.
Duke came to NASA seeking support. After all, Gravity is not a science fiction movie like Transformers or Star Wars. It's crucial to reduce unrealistic elements. NASA is undoubtedly the most authoritative institution in this regard. If he could gain their support, it would help avoid many unnecessary troubles from pre-production to filming to post-production.
Just like that former director, Duke easily gained NASA's support. And since he was even more famous, the agency attached greater importance to the project. Not only did they assign two active astronauts in their rest phase to the crew for on-site guidance, but they also accepted Duke's invitation and dispatched a four-person technical team specifically to help the crew design and film props such as space stations and spacecraft.
According to Duke's plan, most of the scenes inside the space station would be filmed on built sets. Although this team would stay in Los Angeles for less than a month and the crew had to pay a high fee, their involvement would undoubtedly make the constructed sets more professional.
Every shot in the film is based on reality, except for the Chinese Tiangong and Shenzhou spacecraft, due to much of the information not being publicly available. Most other stations and satellites used for shooting had to be precisely modeled instead of imagined.
Regarding the Chinese elements in the film, Duke wouldn't be two-faced like the original director. He included them purely for commercial purposes—to increase appeal in the Chinese market.
Moreover, Warner Bros during pre-sales, once again brought in investment from the China Film Group. They also sent professionals in relevant fields to ensure the Chinese content in the film would not touch upon any sensitive nerves of the censorship authorities.
The biggest selling points of the film are the special effects and the female protagonist's self-rescue storyline, with the special effects being the most commercially appealing.
To make the final cut as immersive as possible, Duke researched many astronaut profiles. After returning to Los Angeles, he kept in close communication with the two astronauts assigned by NASA and gathered plenty of information.
The female lead's solo performance is extremely challenging. Duke paid a lot of attention to Scarlett's preparation. He not only invited a yoga instructor to train her but also had astronauts help her practice the breathing rhythm used in space scenes.
After all, Scarlett came from an artistic background, and George Clooney's screen time was limited. Duke had full confidence in them. Most of the early preparation focused on the special effects.
The biggest challenge in terms of special effects was depicting weightlessness and presenting it to the audience. Besides helping the actors forget the sense of gravity, the crew would use a lot of CG animation techniques to make the compositing more realistic.
It's no exaggeration to say that space is the ultimate dream of humankind. Even for cinema the dream-making machine creating a realistic space on the silver screen is by no means easy.
The ideal scenario would be for the whole film to be shot in outer space. But that's obviously impossible.
The greatest difficulty in producing Gravity lies in the technical aspects, and Duke was fully aware of this. However, compared to Alfonso Cuarón, he had many advantages.
First, Duke is one of the most technically advanced directors in Hollywood. Secondly, he had visited James Cameron's shooting sites several times and was well-acquainted with the improved equipment developed by the "King of the World," many of which could be directly applied to Gravity. Lastly, Industrial Light & Magic's special effects team was powerful enough to quickly translate Duke's remembered VFX ideas into practical applications.
Of course, the most important factor was that Duke's production budget reached as high as $200 million, and additional funding could be allocated if needed. Ample funding also meant more special effects personnel could be hired to work simultaneously, thereby shortening the production time.
The film's realistic space scenes would be entirely CG-generated. The visual effects team spent tremendous time studying real outer space.
"It has to be more realistic than any other space film!"
With this directive from Duke, Gravity's visual effects supervisor Tim Webber began working on the film's special effects even before filming started.
According to Duke's vision, when Gravity's space environment is displayed on the IMAX screen, for audiences wearing 3D glasses in a dark theater, it would feel like an interstellar journey. Most scenes inside the space station would be shot on constructed sets, but the outer space scenes' realism would rely entirely on CG. Every outer space shot would be CG-composited.
In early preparations, Duke and his team interviewed astronauts, read various books about space, studied tens of thousands of photos taken in space all to better understand space; and then spent tremendous effort on the details. As he said, every single frame must be based on reality.
However, China's Tiangong and Shenzhou spacecraft weren't included in that category. Even with investment from the China Film Group, they couldn't obtain that kind of data. Hannah set design team had to rely purely on imagination.
To simulate the magnificent lighting effects in space, the Gravity visual effects team would be the first to use Industrial Light & Magic's newly developed rendering software. During pre-production, ILM's programmers wrote a total of 71,000 lines of shader code in the software.
Tim Webber once described the film's rendering workload to Duke like this: "If you used a single-core CPU computer to render it, you'd have to start from the dawn of Egyptian civilization around 5000 BC—and keep rendering until the next century just to make it in time for the year-end screening."
Special effects work had far outpaced shooting. After completing the modeling, Industrial Light & Magic's massive VFX team began creating several CG-only explosion scenes, at Duke's request. Since explosions in a vacuum are completely different from those on Earth, Duke had no intention of using miniature models to shoot the explosions in the film.
However, based on his instructions, these explosion shots weren't entirely realistic—this was, after all, a commercial movie. Some scenes weren't meant to be realistic but rather to convey an atmosphere and increase the film's appeal.
Besides that, some scenes containing dangerous visuals would also use CG characters.
In fact, some stunts were too dangerous—for example, in scenes where the character floats inside the space capsule, Scarlett Johansson's legs would have to endure significant stress. But Duke would never let her take such risks.
Even if it was to boost her Oscar chances, Duke wouldn't allow any accidents.
Then there was the preparation for simulating weightlessness. For a movie titled Gravity, the issue of weightlessness could not be avoided. It was one of the main focuses during the early stages of production.
Duke had always been well aware that in space-themed films, the weightlessness shown on the big screen was, in fact, the illusion of a weightless perspective rather than actual zero gravity.
Therefore, the core issue he and his team had to solve was how to handle the shifting perspective problem.
As such, John Schwartzman recommended to him a highly maneuverable robotic arm.
The robotic arm was basically something taken from an automobile manufacturing plant. John Schwartzman had once found a small company in San Francisco that mounted cameras onto robotic arms for filming. This allowed for precise control of the camera's movement while also being highly flexible.
This concept inspired him.
The robotic arm boasted a movement speed of 4 meters per second, a motion radius of 3.1 meters, accuracy up to 0.04 millimeters, and featured up to 7-axis joints. It was also mounted on a track over 10 meters long, capable of executing all kinds of complex and delicate maneuvers, shooting at all sorts of tricky angles as desired.
However, in the following filming tests, both Duke and John Schwartzman realized that the results of using the robotic arm were not as ideal as expected.
In the initial tests, Scarlett Johansson was placed on a platform with limited mobility. There were two robotic arms beside her—one controlling a camera, and the other controlling a light source.
This basically represented the crew's idea to solve the problem of zero-gravity shots: shifting camera angles combined with moving light sources.
But the results fell far short of expectations.
This problem troubled Duke for several days. He constantly discussed with Hanna and John, and also brought in Tim Webber, a VFX expert from Industrial Light & Magic. After deliberating among the four of them, they came up with the idea of using the robotic arm as a foundation to build a more suitable piece of equipment for filming—a lightbox!
After continuous experimentation and over half a month of effort, the crew finally created the lightbox that met the expectations of Duke and the other three. The lightbox mainly consisted of LED screens, a movable basket, and the IRIS robotic camera arm.
This was actually a cube-like structure about six meters tall and around three meters wide, specially constructed by the VFX team. The four inner sides were surrounded by LED screens made of 1.8 million light bulbs, and at the center was a simple movable basket where Scarlett Johansson would perform during shooting.
However, the lightbox also had a flaw—it was extremely hot when operating inside...
But with limited time, this was already the best solution the crew could come up with in the short term. While simulating weightlessness, the basket inside the "lightbox" could only tilt up to 45 degrees; beyond that angle, the actor would risk falling.
To ensure the safety of the actor, more of the perspective shifts were accomplished using the IRIS robotic arm to move the camera, creating the effect of relative motion. Moreover, if the actor's body rotated too far, gravity could easily cause facial congestion, distorting the image.
When depicting the effect of the actor "slamming" into the camera, in reality, the actor was almost motionless, and it was the camera, under precise control of the robotic arm, that "slammed" toward the actor.
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