Inside the pages of the most recent Cinefex, a quarterly professional movie special effects magazine, writer Joe Fordham goes deeply into the production of Christopher Nolan’s latest thriller to explore the intensely complex visual and technical feats that carried Inception from Nolan’s dreams onto the big screen.
This article delves deep into the work done by special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, miniatures by New Deal Studio, and digital work by Double Negative, under the guidance of visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin.
Physical effects featured heavily during the inception – a bravura hour-and-20-minute action sequence in the second half of the film – where dreams within dreams create ripple effects of shifting equilibrium and weightlessness. […]
Shifting-gravity sets included giant gimbal rigs that production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas designed in collaboration with Chris Corbould’s team and stunt coordinator Tom Struthers. “One set was 100 feet long with corridors branching off it,” noted Corbould. “One minute a character would be walking along the floor with room off to the side, the next minute he’d be on the wall and the side corridor would turn into a 12-foot drop.”
While set construction was under way in the UK, Double Negative and Lidar VFX embarked on a location survey in Paris to prepare for a key scene at the cafe where Cobb introduces Ariadne to the wonders of dream sharing. Three months before principal photography was set to begin, the survey team, equipped with a Canon 1DS Mark II digital SLR camera, gathered 500 gigabytes of 4K still images within the bustling Rive Gauche district. These photos were stitched together to form gigantic textures as large as 16K.
We knew we were going to have to avoid large greenscreens on set. Chris Nolan and his director of photography, Wally Pfister, just don’t shoot that way. They move very quickly, often with a handheld camera, and we had to work around that. We relied on a lot of rotoscoping in postproduction to isolate actors from backgrounds, and then rebuilt environments that transformed around them.
At a roundtable discussion in March of 2010, we found out that Inception was shot on 65mm film as well as VistaVision as a substitute for IMAX. Team Nolan wanted to achieve the highest picture quality possible for this film without having to worry about the burdens attached to the IMAX format e.g. two-minute loads, camera size, camera noise, etc. Chris Nolan also stated: “…given that it deals with a potentially surreal area, the nature of dreams and so forth, I wanted it to be as realistic as possible.”
Quite often, we’d be in the middle of a scene, and Chris and Wally would switch to the 65 where they felt it would merit it. We did that for our Paris street effects, where the incredibly detailed architecture and very high-contrast sunlit streets really leant themselves to the 65. We scanned the 35mm footage at a minimum 4K resolution, and 65mm at 6K, and preserved that resolution through to final delivery.
Accompanying the story are thirty-four color photographs, including frames from the film and behind-the-scenes shots of the effects work. This wonderfully lush Cinefex article ranges from describing how Nolan and his team filmed Leonardo DiCaprio falling backwards into a bathtub in a Los Angeles hotel room at 720 and 1,000 frames per second to how they used a nitrogen canon to jettison a Ford Econoline van from an upraised section of a drawbridge. This edition of Cinefex is certainly worth the purchase, and most definitely worth the read. It’s available for only $12.50 (shipped) if you’re in the United States. And check out their Facebook page while you’re at it.
