Made in Hollywood

The method Duke used to film "Gravity" is very special, which also determines that its post-production will be very different from the previous movies. He was aware of this as early as the early preparations.

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

The film wants to be screened before the new year in order to be eligible to register for the Oscar competition. There is only three months of post-production time. For such a film, the difficulty can be imagined, even John Schwartz Both Zman and Tim Webber persuaded Duke to abandon this Oscar, and it will not be too late next year.

But they didn't know what Duke was thinking. He rushed to produce this film for this Oscar. Unless "Black Swan" is also moved to be released in North America next year, he will not change his plan.

This is obviously impossible. "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 to the homes of Industrial Light and Magic and George Lucas again. The production cost of "Gravity" was also added to 230 million US dollars, and the film had nearly two-thirds of the funding. All will be invested in special effects production.

This is a commercial society. As long as you can afford to pay, you can get enough staff.

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

But Duke knows very well that in order to make the film good enough, special effects production is one aspect, and storytelling is also one aspect. "Gravity" is in line with reality, but it is not rigidly based on reality.

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

Since the film will be composed of a large number of long shots, shots longer than five minutes are everywhere, and the editing work is relatively less cumbersome than in the past. Duke completely threw the initial cutting work to Mike Dawson, and he coordinated the special effects production work including North America, South Asia, Europe and Southeast Asia in the special effects headquarters of Warner Studios.

The special effects production started long before the filming started, and the shooting process has been going on, otherwise it would not be possible to complete the production that would take months to render only, and Duke used a lot of resources to gather a large number of people, and many shots can be performed at the same time. deal with.

Of course, the consequence is that high production cost.

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

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

According to Duke's requirements, the shots and cg produced lenses need to add many lens effects such as penetration, sparkle and chromatic aberration.

Due to time constraints, the special effects team of Industrial Light and Magic planned to use the newly developed special effects development software named "Arnold" renderer at the very beginning, which is powerful. But it has not been actually used in any previous movies.

Because it is the first time to use, it faces an unusually huge workload. Many people, including Duke, are still a little worried. Fortunately, the Arnold renderer has a powerful memory management function that allows many complex scenes to be rendered.

This is what the Arnold renderer is good at, using many complex geometries to complete the rendering. At the same time, it can do a lot of ray tracing. Due to the long working hours of rendering and the huge pressure exerted by Duke, the special effects team of Industrial Light and Magic must always confirm that what is done is correct. There is no help. That is undoubtedly smashing the trademark of Industrial Light & Magic.

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

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

Duke also explained to Tim Webb, the special effects director of Industrial Light and Magic on the crew, to let them understand the necessity of doing this, "Because when you shoot in space, you can’t use the best camera to shoot. It’s impossible to change the lens. Many things can’t be done, so the purpose of using those special effects lenses is to show the feeling of photography 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 there is no light reflected from the earth in the shadow, the contrast will become particularly large. , Is bigger than anything seen on earth.

So, a lot of high-contrast images are needed in movies.

How to convince the audience of the authenticity of what happened in space is more troublesome. Generally, Duke cannot be used in the bridge segment of space movies, whether it is with simulation or special effects. For example, the pulsed electromagnetic radiation caused by the discharge process in the atmosphere, that is, Tiandian, is not so powerful to deal with the distant Tiandian, which does not meet the expectations of movie viewers.

There are also explosions. If there are explosions in the universe, few people know what they are like.

Therefore, in post-production, the information provided by the astronauts is not completely followed, and sometimes an exception has to be made. For example, it usually takes 50 minutes for an astronaut to get out of the space station. Such things must not be copied. Just as happy, the film gave them such a thing, and the consequences can be imagined.

Of course, for actions and things, Duke will still do the same as reality first, and there will be some exceptions, but it will always make these actions look meaningful.

There is another job that will directly affect 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 then re-release them to make a big profit.

There is no doubt that 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 "Avatar" boom and earned more than $300 million in box office worldwide.

For "Gravity", Duke decided to make it into a 3D movie more for its story service. Most of the scenes inside are floating in outer space, and the effect of 3D words is definitely impressive.

Long ago, Duke confirmed that "Gravity" would be a combination of cg and real-life shooting, but before starting shooting, he had not decided whether to shoot directly in 3d or convert it to 3d later.

Duke and John Schwarzman tried to shoot in 3D, but in actual operation, they need to put heavy 3D shooting equipment in a narrow light box, which is very troublesome.

Therefore, after Duke went to Industrial Light & Magic and brought back the 3D conversion results, the crew found that the specific environment of space and the crew’s special shooting methods, the real shot conversion picture is no different from directly shooting in 3D. And the actual shooting efficiency is much higher.

As a result, Duke did not hesitate to abandon the plan of 3D real shooting.

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

The traditional 3d conversion method is to convert the movie into 3d during post-production, but "Gravity" is different.

As early as in the pre-production, the work of ILM’s conversion to 3D began. Duke’s 3D director Chris Parks has been working with ILM’s related teams. He explained Duke’s work in detail to them. Ideas are all carefully thought out.

For example, the huge contrast between the empty space of the vast universe and the space capsule that is almost claustrophobic.

From the very beginning, this team faced a huge challenge. They had to ensure that the converted 3d images could be seamlessly connected to the 3d images made by cgi.

After the real scene shooting, it needs to be converted to 3d. The cgi produced is also 3d. Both are 3d, but one is converted and the other is made with special effects.

One more thing, when doing this, they can't make sure that this will be the picture Duke will eventually want. The team must try to maintain the flexibility and creativity of the conversion process.

More than that, when they were working, "Gravity" was not a finished movie. They worked with the crew to follow the progress of the shooting. The team did not start to switch in the later stage. They have been keeping with Duke's crew. The same progress.

The entire post-production is closely connected and is a standard team behavior. Duke is only the chief commander. Many shots are processed in Los Angeles and San Francisco and sent to India and Singapore, where they do the most cumbersome transfers. The work was then transferred to London for processing, and finally transferred back to Los Angeles for review by Duke and visual effects director Tim Webber.

Duke must ensure that all the pictures are consistent with the environment, and make the environment more beautiful when possible. Of course, this requires the entire post-production team to work together to complete.

In the final editing, the technical rigor is to make the picture seamless, so that the audience cannot see where the editing point is. Duke more often considers where to edit from the perspective of 3d. The entire 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.

Undoubtedly, "Gravity" is the most complex and detailed work of Industrial Light & Magic to date.

The length of the lens and the high requirements for detail performance during the conversion have all been achieved by Duke under the current conditions. Many people who have seen his completed clips think that 3D will change the movie one day.

Time soon arrived at Thanksgiving. Before Thanksgiving, Duke temporarily put aside his work and prepared to participate in the premiere of the final chapter of the "Harry Potter" series. (To be continued.)

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