my movie years

Chapter 402 Difficulties in Special Effects Production

Also coming to Iceland with Zhang Hao were the special effects engineers and technicians from Tiangong Yicai and Yuegong Studio.

In addition, the location team selected a suitable place to build a one-to-one scale base, and the internal details must be realistic.

According to Zhang Hao's idea, the bombing scene would be filmed after the filming at this base.

However, the local government and environmental groups in Iceland believed that this would harm the glacier's environmental protection, so Zhang Hao finally gave up.We built a miniature model at the Qingdao studio and used CGI to shoot the shots.

After the inspection in Iceland, Zhang Hao flew to North America and went to the IMAX company to check out the latest cameras they had to offer.

There were two high-bit-rate cameras, originally used for filming documentaries, and they were all rented by Zhang Hao.

DJI drone engineers worked with IMAX to improve the drone and set up one of the cameras on the drone to facilitate shooting high-altitude footage.

The other one is detachable and can be used with the Titan robotic arm or carried by a person for shooting.

However, the IMAX company said that this camera is a bit heavy and is not recommended for people to carry.

Before returning to China, Warner Pictures President Doug Walter revealed to Zhang Hao that Disney was lobbying North America to prohibit IMAX from continuing to cooperate with Chinese film companies.

It goes without saying that this news is aimed at Zhang Hao, and Wanda has just suffered a disaster.

However, it is just lobbying at the moment. Warner Pictures and IMAX are fully supporting Zhang Hao, so it is not a big problem.

Speaking of Disney, last year's "The Dark Knight Rises" didn't stand in the way. Marvel is full of confidence this year. "Avengers 4: Endgame" is about to be released.

Without Zhang Hao's discussion, Disney believes that this movie will achieve good results.

At the same time, there were messages saying that Kevin Feige, the president of Disney, ordered him to step down as president of Marvel Studios after ordering him to take charge of the last Avengers movie.

This is somewhat of a cunning rabbit and a lackey, and it also proves that Disney is fighting internally. Kevin Feige will never sit still and wait for death.

Other Hollywood companies will take advantage of this opportunity and think about how to tear off two pieces of flesh from Disney.

Another important thing, regarding the acquisition of 21st Century Fox, has come to an end, and all companies have finished dividing it up.

By July this year, Fox, one of the famous Hollywood giants, will disappear.

In this long tug-of-war for acquisitions, Zhang Hao and the team behind him had a good time and secured some distribution resources in Europe and the United States.

In addition, the most important thing is that with the tacit approval of Rupert Murdoch, he grabbed the copyright of "X-Men", which severely disgusted Disney and Marvel.

Most importantly, Firefly and Warner Pictures have reached an agreement to jointly develop a new series of "X-Men".

DC Comics even asked Marvel Comics if they would sell the rights to the X-Men comics, which made the top management of Marvel Comics very angry.

Then Marvel Comics began to ask Disney why it failed to keep "X-Men".

Of course Disney won't do it either. Who asked you to sell the rights to Fox in the first place?Do you regret it now?
In short, this is another contradiction.

Putting this matter aside, after returning to China, Zhang Hao went to the special effects studio to see the black hole model produced by the special effects.

Under the theoretical guidance of Kip Thorne, the special effects engineers, led by Gong Jun, began to develop a new rendering software.

In the past, special effects renderers followed the principle that light propagates in straight lines, but this principle does not apply to black holes.

Gong Jun and the engineers had to find a way to write a bending ray renderer based on Kip Thorne's formula.

When the effect was completed, Kip Thorne was full of praise, thinking that this was the first simulation renderer in history that complied with the general theory of relativity.

Engineers simulated a rapidly rotating black hole in a computer and placed a flat, colored ring around the black hole for testing.

After some computational simulation, something strange happened.

They found that the distorted space around the black hole distorted the accretion disk itself, causing the halo to become criss-crossed and oddly shaped.

The special effects team thought there was an error in the rendering algorithm, but after analysis, Kip Thorne concluded that this is what a black hole should look like.Kip Thorne said: "The specific appearance of black holes and wormholes has never been shown in movies before. You have done it. This is the most physically consistent black hole scene that humans have so far."

There were also more than a dozen Ph.D.s from the Department of Physics at Kyungseong University who participated in the production of the entire simulated black hole. After participating in this project, they went back and wrote several papers.

Zhang Hao then asked the team to edit a video of a simulated black hole of more than ten seconds and put it online to promote the PhDs' thesis.

Everyone is wondering why Director Zhang is so anxious to release this black hole video before filming has even started.

But unexpectedly, a week later, the world's first black hole photo was released. It looked similar to the one in the simulated black hole video, and instantly stirred up waves.

Science fiction Science fiction is fantasy first and science second.What can't be done is called science fiction.

But now a science fiction movie crew has simulated the real appearance of a black hole. How can we not be surprised?

Not to mention, many doctors published several papers based on this, which shocked netizens.

Brother, are you making a movie?I'm afraid I'm not doing science!What surprised netizens the most was that the simulated black hole was produced before the photos of the real black hole were released.

"Brother, are you serious?"

"I'm sorry, Director Zhang wants to film a black hole in real life."

"It's so awesome, I asked who else can do it?"

"Oh my god, when this movie comes out, I must go to the cinema to watch it."

"It's exactly the same. It's a crew that has a Nobel Prize winner as a consultant. Director Zhang is awesome..."

Netizens were amazed, but insiders were shocked.If not Director Zhang, what are you doing?Will you give us a way to survive?
But there is no way, the crew's preparations will not stop because of their ideas.

Another difficulty in special effects production is the wormhole. The plot of the film is set in the near future, where the population is exploding, the environment is deteriorating, and people are looking for a place to live in outer space.

The problem is that even the fastest Parker detector currently used by humans will take more than 6000 years to reach the nearest galaxy.After more than 6000 years, there will be no human beings on the earth.

As early as 1983, Carl Sagan hoped to solve this problem when he wrote "Contact."

Thorne suggested using wormholes, and Zhang Hao certainly had the same idea.

A wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel in high-dimensional space that can help people reach very distant places in a short time.

"Interstellar" naturally borrowed the wormhole theory. When Thorne explained this theory to Zhang Hao, a big question before Zhang Hao was: How to express wormholes on the screen?

Current physics believes that wormholes are everywhere, but their existence time is extremely short and cannot meet the needs of humans to travel through wormholes.

But according to the plot design, the wormholes in the film were created by them (future humans). They are high-dimensional creatures and can understand high-dimensional space and time, so they can arbitrarily create wormholes that meet the needs of human beings to travel through.

Thorne believes that there are only three parameters that affect the appearance of a wormhole: its length, radius and gravitational lens size.

He asked the special effects team to change these three parameters and create wormholes with various effects.

In the end, considering the beauty of the picture and the audience's understanding, Zhang Hao chose the wormhole effect with a short length and a relatively small gravitational lens effect.

In this case, the distant universe shown in the wormhole will not be greatly deformed, and the entire structure will look like a crystal ball filled with galaxies and nebulae from the distant universe.

As for the scene when traveling through the wormhole, the results calculated by the special effects team based on Thorne's formula are no different from those in previous movies. It is a tunnel with some bright spots on the wall of the tunnel.

Zhang Hao felt that this effect was too bland and not novel enough, so the special effects team abandoned the idea of ​​completely referring to Thorne's formula, and instead artificially added many artistic elements to make the final effect more shocking.

In addition, the production of special effects such as the five-dimensional cube, the huge waves on the planet, and the simulation of the space environment all started long before the filming of the film started.

But until the film is completed, these special effects work may not be completed, and the amount of work required is too great.

After a long preparation period, on the occasion of the release of "Avengers 4: Endgame", the film officially started shooting its first shot in a cornfield.

(End of this chapter)