The method that Duke used to shoot "Gravity" was very special, which also determined that its post-production would be very different from the previous films, and he as a director realized this as early as the pre-preparation. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

Aside from technical and financial issues, the first challenge is time.

The film wants to be screened before the New Year in order to qualify for the Oscars, and there is only three months of post-production time. Schwartzman and Tim? Webb has persuaded Duke to give up this Oscar, and it is not too late to wait until next year.

But they don't know Duke's mind, the reason why he rushed to make this film is for this Oscars, unless "Black Swan" is also moved to North America next year, he will not change his plans.

This is obviously not possible, "Black Swan" has already had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and will officially land in North America in October.

After the shooting, Duke went on another trip to ILM and George? Lucas's home, "Gravity", has also increased the production cost to $230 million, and nearly two-thirds of the film's funds will be invested in special effects.

This is a commercial society, and as long as you can afford it, you can get enough people.

ILM mobilized almost all the people it could to work on Gravity in post-production, not just in North America, but also in London, India, and Singapore, where they mobilized a large number of people and digital engineers to work on the most time-consuming and laborious lens renderings.

However, Duke is very clear that in order to make the film good enough, the special effects production is one thing, and the storytelling is also the other, and "Gravity" is in line with reality, but it is not rigid and completely based on reality.

For example, in post-production, the orbital heights of many space stations and satellites are appropriately compressed.

Since the film will be composed of a large number of long shots. Footage longer than five minutes abounds, editing is relatively less tedious than it used to be, and Duke threw the first cut entirely to Mike? Dawson, who works in Warner Studios' special effects headquarters. Coordinated the production of special effects including North America, South Asia, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

The special effects had already begun before the film had even started filming, and the filming process had been going on, otherwise it would have been impossible to complete the production that would have taken months to render alone, and Duke had a lot of money to muster a lot of people, so many shots could be processed at the same time.

Of course. The consequence is the high cost of production.

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

In the whole post-production, there is a lot of important work, and lens rendering is undoubtedly the most tedious.

According to Duke's requirements, after shooting and CG production, it is necessary to add a variety of lens effects such as penetration, sparkle, and chromatic aberration.

Due to the tight schedule, ILM's special effects team planned to use the newly developed special effects development software named 'Arnold' renderer at the beginning, which was a powerful software. But it hasn't been used in any of the previous films.

Because it is the first time to use it, and facing an unusually large workload, including Duke, many people are still a little worried, fortunately, the Arnold renderer has a super memory management function, so that many complex scenes can be rendered.

This is something that the Arnold renderer excels at, rendering with a lot of complex geometry while also doing a lot of ray tracing, due to the long working time of rendering. And the huge pressure exerted by Duke, ILM's special effects team has to always make sure that they are doing it right, and if what is made does not help the texture of the whole movie, it is undoubtedly smashing ILM's signature.

And Duke also made them use a lot of instantiations. to increase the complexity of the picture.

"Part of the reason is that it's good for the audience's senses."

Duke is also interested in ILM's special effects supervisor on the crew, Tim? Webb explained the need to make them aware of the need for this, "because you can't shoot with the best camera or change lenses when you're shooting in space. You can't do a lot of things, so you can use those special effects lenses to show the feeling of being in space photography. ”

According to Duke's understanding, there will really be some light leakage when shooting in space, due to the remoteness of the sun and the darkness of space, if the light reflected from the earth is not shown in the shadow part, then the contrast will become very large, more than anything seen on the earth.

Therefore, there is a need for a lot of high-contrast pictures in the movie.

How to convince the audience of the reality of what happened in space is more nerve-wracking, and it is generally used in space movies to make Duke not use, whether it is with simulation or special effects. For example, the pulsed electromagnetic radiation caused by the discharge process in the atmosphere -- that is, the celestial electricity, which handles the distant celestial electricity so muffled and not so powerful, does not meet the expectations of movie audiences.

And the explosion, if there is an explosion in the universe, not many people know what it is.

Therefore, in post-production, it will not be completely in accordance with the information provided by the astronauts, and sometimes it is necessary to make exceptions, for example, it often takes 50 minutes for astronauts to go out of the space station, and such things must not be copied.

Of course, for actions or something, Duke will still do the same as reality first, and some will make exceptions, but it will always make these actions seem meaningful.

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

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

There is no doubt that Duke is ahead of Hollywood, and as early as the beginning of the year, the 3D version of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy took advantage of the "Avatar" craze and collected more than $300 million at the global box office.

As for "Gravity", Duke's decision to make it a 3D movie is more for its story, and the scenes in it, most of which are floating in outer space, must be very effective in 3D.

Duke had long confirmed that Gravity would be a combination of CG and live-action filming, but he had not decided whether he wanted to shoot directly in 3D or convert to 3D in post-production before starting shooting.

Duke and John? Schwartzman tried shooting in 3D, but in practice, it was cumbersome to put bulky 3D shooting equipment in a cramped light box.

Therefore, after Duke went to ILM and brought back the 3D conversion results, the crew found that in the specific environment of space and the special shooting methods of the crew, the actual shooting conversion picture is no different from directly shooting in 3D, and the actual shooting efficiency is much higher.

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

But "Gravity" is definitely not a fake 3D film, and its shooting and production methods are extremely special, which is very different from traditional converted 3D.

Unlike the traditional 3D conversion approach, the film is converted to 3D in post-production.

As early as in pre-production, the work of Industrial Light & Magic Conversion 3D began, and Duke's 3D director, Chris? Parks had been working with the ILM team, and he explained Duke's philosophy to them in detail, all of which had been well thought out.

For example, there is a huge contrast between the emptiness of the vast universe and the almost claustrophobic narrowness of the space capsule.

From the very beginning, the team was faced with the challenge of ensuring that the converted 3D images would work seamlessly with the 3D images created by CGI.

After the live shooting, it will be converted to 3D, and the CGI will also be 3D, both of which are 3D, but one is converted and the other is made of special effects.

Also, while doing this, they couldn't be sure that this would be what Duke would end up looking for, and the team did their best to keep the transition flexible and creative.

Not only that, but when they were working, "Gravity" was not yet a finished film, and they worked with the crew to follow the filming schedule, and the team didn't start switching in post-production, they kept the same schedule as Duke's crew.

The whole post-production was tightly connected, a standard team activity, Duke was just the chief conductor of it, and a lot of the shots were taken out of Los Angeles and San Francisco, sent to India and Singapore, where they did the most tedious rotoscoping work, and then sent to London for processing, and finally transferred back to Los Angeles, where Duke and VFX supervisor Tim? Webb did the audit.

Duke had to make sure that everything was in line with the environment, and that it was possible to make the environment as beautiful as possible, which of course required the entire post-production team to work together.

In the final editing, the technical rigor is to make the picture seamless, so that the audience can't see where the editing point is, Duke is more often thinking about where to cut from a 3D perspective, and the whole editing team is doing the same thing for 3D - finding that subtle editing point to make the picture look like it hasn't been edited.

Gravity is undoubtedly ILM's most complex and detailed work to date.

The length of the shots, the high requirements for detail performance during the transition, Duke has achieved the extreme in today's conditions, and even many people who have seen the footage he has completed think that 3D will one day change the movie.

It's Thanksgiving fast, and before Thanksgiving, Duke takes a break from what he's doing to get ready for the premiere of the final chapter of the Harry Potter series. (To be continued.) )

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