Thursday, 30 October 2014

Inception - Extras

So, one of my aims was to watch a few movies here and there, watch the making of etc.
It was to get the comments of the actors, producers, to get their opinion in this matter in the way.
After watching the making of the Inception, I was a little surprised of the amount of difficult sets they built. They went through a lot of trouble!
I've collected a few quotes I might use in my essay ^^

"Normally for an earthquake shot, youd build a set on rigs, that would shake it etc. But because of the size of this set it wasn't possible to do that."
Chris Corbould, Special Effects Supervisor

"We used a lot of different earthquake devices, camera devices for shaking the camera, but they all did it in a very mechanical way so all the shakes were done the old fashioned way just by shaking the camera."
Christopher Nolan, Writer/Director

"All the way through we were aware there was an earthquake going on so we were pulling on statues, pulling on vases... we were able to drop boxes from a height at a push of a button."
Chris Corbould, Special Effects Supervisor

There was a lot of choreography involved. Because everything needed to be safe,especially with glass and metal beams falling around the actor. It all came down to the actors focus. He was where he needed to be at the time.

"Flooding was achieved by a 200 kg pressurized containers"
"If you don't get it right the first time you're into a big re-dress because you've got 3000-4000 gallons of water now on the set"
"We had a bike flipping over and a car flipping over to make it seem really real" ( they were on strings and they pulled them at the right time)
vfx supervisor

About the explosions on the street.
"What we can do with vfx is add all the things that wasn't possible to do on the day, the debris, furniture, glass pottery, masonry and rigit pieces. (for obvious health and safety reasons) We can bring an extra level of danger and destruction. What you see is a mixture of reality and vfx.
Paul Franklin, vfx Supervisor

About the infinite staircase:
"It had to be mathematically perfect. And in that it had to be at a particular length and a particular height and distance and the camera had to drop in a particular way to HIDE the trickery."
Wally Pfister, Director of Photography

Interesting how they built the train. Fibreglass, plywood, semi-metal. All on a long tractor axes, so they can drive it. Had to make sure everything looks right, has all the right textures in the right places. Another thing was to make sure it's strong enough so when it drives into obstacles cars etc. it just pushes them out of the way rather than smash to pieces.

"Make it rain, is one of the most difficult things to do in pictures."
Nilo Otero, First Assistant Director

"The tilted bar, there was all this talk about how we could do this and the use of green screen and smoke effects, let's just do this in post, and we all knew, that we wouldn't, it just had to be done properly for it to be a believable thing." (So they built it, tilted between 20 and 45 degrees)
Guy Hendrix Dyas, Production Designer

Rotating Corridor
"Suspended the set in these huge rings"
Guy Hendrix
Tons of steel needed to be built and welded before the set was built. The main thing was the accuracy, to avoid any unneeded vibrations etc.

"With any of the sets that required this kinda movement the equipment had to be locked into the set. It either had to rotate with it or the set rotate around it. It required a lot of planning in order to see what was gonna happen with the lights etc."
Wally Pifster, director of photography

"With so many action movies, everything is computerised where as these scenes that we did, they were so well thought out with the things revolving, it's up to me to keep my balance and we did the performance and I love that. It's the most challenging and most fun."
Joseph Gordon- Levitt


Here we see a good balance between the traditional tricks and the vfx. It's a good mix where one supports the other, none of them overpower anything and in my opinion, that's how it should be. Because nobody wants to see a purely cg movie but at the same time they want to see amazing places and great effects.
Watching the making of showed me a lot of pros and cons about both of the ways. Which I will definitely use in my dissertation.

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