Chapter 762: Simulating Weightlessness

The America National Aeronautics and Space Administration, abbreviated as NASA, was an administrative research agency of the Federal Government responsible for formulating and implementing America's civilian space program, as well as conducting aeronautics and aerospace research. Its headquarters was located in Washington D.C.

Duke came to NASA to seek support. After all, Gravity was not a sci-fi movie like Transformers or Star Wars. He had to minimize the elements that contradicted reality. NASA was undoubtedly the most authoritative institution. If he could get their backing, it would certainly save him a lot of unnecessary trouble from pre-production through filming and into post-production.

Just like the original director of the film, Duke easily secured NASA's support. Moreover, since his fame was even greater, the agency took the project much more seriously. Not only did they dispatch two active-duty astronauts on leave to provide on-site guidance for the crew, but they also accepted Duke's hiring offer, sending a dedicated four-man technical team to help design and shoot props like the space station and spacecraft.

Under Duke's plan, most of the interior scenes of the space station in the movie would be shot on built sets. Although this team would only stay in Los Angeles for less than a month and the crew had to pay them a hefty salary, their participation would undoubtedly make the constructed sets much more professional.

Every shot in the film was based on reality. Except for China's Tiangong and Shenzhou spacecraft—which largely relied on imagination since many of their details remained unreleased—the other space stations and satellites used in the shoot had to undergo precise 3D modeling.

Speaking of the film's Chinese elements, Duke wasn't going to be a hypocrite like the original director. He included Chinese elements purely for commercial reasons, aiming to boost the movie's appeal in the Chinese market.

Furthermore, during pre-sales, Warner Brothers had once again brought in funding from the China Film Group. The latter also dispatched relevant professionals to ensure that the China-related content in the movie wouldn't touch the sensitive nerves of the big scissors.

The film's biggest selling points were the visual effects and the female lead's self-rescue, with the visual effects holding even more commercial appeal.

To make the audience feel as immersed as possible in the final product, Duke looked up extensive information on astronauts. After returning to Los Angeles, he kept communicating with the two astronauts sent by NASA, gathering a wealth of information.

The female lead's solo performance in the film was extremely difficult. Therefore, Duke paid close attention to the details of Scarlett Johansson's preparations. Not only did he hire a yoga instructor to train her, but he also had the astronauts drill her on the space-breathing rhythm she would use during filming.

After all, Scarlett Johansson started out as an indie film actress, and George Clooney's screen time was limited, so Duke felt relatively at ease with them. His main energy during pre-production was focused on the visual effects.

When it came to visual effects, the biggest challenge of the shoot was portraying the state of weightlessness and presenting it to the audience. Aside from making the actors forget the feeling of gravity as much as possible, the crew would use a lot of CG animation techniques to make the composites look more realistic.

It was no exaggeration to say that space was the ultimate dream of all humanity. Even for a dream-making machine like cinema, creating a realistic outer space on the silver screen was no easy task.

The most ideal scenario would be for the crew to shoot the entire film in space. But that was obviously impossible.

The greatest difficulty in producing Gravity came from the technical side. Duke was well aware of this, but compared to Alfonso Cuaron from his past life, he possessed far too many advantages.

First, Duke was also one of the directors at the very forefront of Hollywood technology. Second, he had visited James Cameron's sets multiple times and had a sufficient understanding of the equipment improved by the "King of the World," much of which could be directly applied to Gravity's shoot. Finally, Industrial Light and Magic's effects team was powerful enough that when Duke proposed some of the visual effects solutions from his memory, they quickly figured out practical ways to apply them.

Of course, the most important thing was that Duke's production budget was a staggering 200 million dollars, which could be further increased if necessary. Ample funding meant they could hire more visual effects staff to work simultaneously, thereby compressing the production time.

The lifelike space scenery in the film would be entirely created using CG, and the visual effects team spent a massive amount of time studying real outer space.

"It must be more realistic than any other space movie!"

Carrying this demand from Duke, Gravity's visual effects supervisor, Tim Webber, began working on the film's effects even before shooting started.

According to Duke's vision, when Gravity's space environment was presented on an IMAX screen, it would be no less than an interstellar journey for the audience sitting in the dark wearing 3D glasses. The entire movie only had most of its interior space station scenes shot on built sets; the immersive, realistic outer space actually had to be achieved through CG, with all space shots composited digitally.

During pre-production, Duke and his team interviewed astronauts, read all sorts of books about space, and studied thousands of photographs taken in space to understand it. Then, they poured a tremendous amount of effort into the details, strictly ensuring, just as he had said, that every frame in every shot was based on reality.

However, China's Tiangong and Shenzhou were not included in this. Even though they had brought in funding from the China Film Group, the latter couldn't get their hands on classified information in this area, so Hannah Serena's set decoration team could only rely on their imaginations.

To simulate the magnificent lighting of space, Gravity's visual effects team would also be the first to use a newly developed software by Industrial Light and Magic as their image renderer. During pre-production, ILM's programmers wrote a full 71,000 lines of shading code in the software.

Tim Webber once described the rendering workload of the film to Duke this way: "If we used a single-core CPU computer to produce this, it would have to render from the dawn of Egyptian civilization, which is 5000 BC, all the way into the next century just to make it in time for the test screening at the end of the year."

The visual effects work moved far ahead of the actual shoot. After completing the modeling, at Duke's request, Industrial Light and Magic's massive effects team took the lead in producing several explosion scenes relying entirely on CG. Since explosions in a vacuum were completely different from explosions on Earth, Duke never planned to use practical miniature explosions to shoot those scenes anyway.

However, per his requirements, these explosion shots were not completely realistic. After all, this was a commercial film; some shots were meant to convey a certain atmosphere and boost the movie's appeal rather than strictly adhere to reality.

Besides that, quite a few dangerous shots in certain scenes would also use CG characters.

In fact, some stunts were just too dangerous. For example, during the suspended shots inside the space capsule, Scarlett Johansson's legs would be subjected to a tremendous ordeal, but Duke wasn't going to let her risk that kind of injury.

Even if it was to help her Oscar Campaign, Duke would not allow any accidents to happen.

Next was preparing to create a weightless environment. A movie named Gravity couldn't possibly avoid the issue of weightlessness, and this was one of the key tasks in pre-production.

Duke had always been very clear that the weightlessness shown on the big screen in space movies was actually a weightlessness of the visual perspective, not real weightlessness.

Therefore, the core problem he and his team had to solve was how to handle the shifting perspectives.

Thus, John Schwartzman recommended a highly maneuverable robotic arm to him.

The robotic arm was basically taken straight out of a car manufacturing plant. John Schwartzman had once discovered a small company in San Francisco that mounted cameras on robotic arms for filming; this allowed for precise control over the camera's movements while remaining extremely flexible.

This inspiration gave him an idea.

This robotic arm boasted a movement speed of 4 meters per second, a reach radius of 3.1 meters, and an action precision down to 0.04 millimeters. With up to 7 joint axes and a track exceeding 10 meters in length, it was more than capable of executing all sorts of complex and delicate maneuvers, capturing footage from any tricky angle desired.

However, during the subsequent camera tests, both Duke and John Schwartzman found that the results produced by the robotic arm weren't as good as they had imagined.

During the initial tests, Scarlett Johansson was placed on a rig with a limited range of motion. She was flanked by two robotic arms—one controlling a camera lens, and the other controlling the light source.

This basically represented the crew's approach to solving the problem of weightless shots—shifting camera angles combined with moving light sources.

But the resulting footage fell far short of expectations.

This problem troubled Duke for several days. He constantly discussed it with Hannah Serena and John Schwartzman, and even called over Industrial Light and Magic's visual effects expert, Tim Webber. After deliberating, the four of them came up with the idea of using the robotic arm as a foundation to build a device much better suited for filming—the Light Box!

After continuous experimentation taking over half a month, the crew managed to construct the ideal Light Box envisioned by the four of them. The Light Box primarily consisted of LED screens, a movable basket, and IRIS Robotic Arm cameras.

This was actually a custom cubic rig built by the visual effects team, roughly six meters tall and three meters wide. Its four walls were surrounded by LED screens made up of 1.8 million bulbs, with a simple movable basket right in the center. During filming, Scarlett Johansson would perform inside this basket.

But this Light Box also had a flaw: it got incredibly hot inside when it was running...

However, with limited time, this was already the best solution the crew could come up with on short notice. When simulating weightlessness, the basket inside the Light Box could only be tilted up to 45 degrees, because exceeding that angle put the actor at risk of falling out.

To guarantee the actor's safety, further perspective shifts would be achieved through relative displacement driven by the IRIS Robotic Arm moving the camera. Moreover, if the actor's body rotated too far, gravity would easily cause blood to rush to their face, breaking the visual illusion.

When depicting the effect of an actor "smashing into" the camera, the actor actually remained basically motionless. Instead, the camera, under the precise control of the robotic arm, would "smash into" the actor.