OUAN504 - Interstellar, The Black Hole

Around the time that Interstellar was released I spent a lot of time reading about the way the film was made, as I hold a personal interest in it and furthermore I am interested in the way that Christopher Nolan makes his films. I came across a story detailing the innovations made in order to create the black hole scene in Interstellar. I was blown away by the level of thought and dedication that had been placed into the scene and there was also some interesting information about the way it was made, and how long it took to render such a complex scene.

The studio behind the visual effects for this scene was Double Negative. For many films artists are sometimes asked or required to produce images of objects or concepts that doesn't have any accompanying reference imagery, and is hard to imagine. For Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar which is a story based around 'inter-dimensional' space travel, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin and and the artists at visual effects studio; Double Negative were asked to produce images of a black hole. Not only were they required to make it look real and 'accurate' despite the fact that no one has ever seen one they were also asked to make sure it was accurate to quantum physics and relativistic laws as well as have the best understanding of quantum gravity that they could achieve. How could they do this? Fortunately for the visual effects team and for the film itself, scientist Oliver James was among the people working on the project at Double Negative. James studied optics and atomic physics at Oxford University and possesses a personal understanding of Einstein’s relativity laws that needed to be applied to this project. He worked with scientific advisor Kip Thorne, who was Nolan's personal advisor for the film during production and whilst he was writing the script. I watched an interview with Nolan and Thorne where he said that he would meet up with him and suggest ideas, and Thorne would approve or disapprove them on a scientific basis, or at least try to find a way that Nolan could incorporate these themes or ideas into the film. For the purpose of creating the black hole, Thorne would work out complex equations in software program 'Mathematica' and send them to James to recode into IMAX quality renderings of the imagery. (Mathematica is a symbolic mathematical computation program, sometimes called a computer algebra program.) To reach the requirements of the film and to solve the visual problems involved in creating a concept like this, James had to not only visualise equations describing the arcing and bending path of light but also the equations eventually described how the cross section of a beam of light changes its size and shape during its journey past the black hole. This level of collaboration eventually gave way to the visuals we can see in Interstellar. Of course, the code created by Oliver James was only part of the solution to the problem. Even then James’ code was only part of the solution. He worked closely with a full team of artists and designers, which was lead by CG supervisor Eugenie von Tunzelmann. Furthermore, as complex as their problem regarding the accuracy and realism of creating a black hole the team also had to show someone entering a four-dimensional 'tesseract', that casts shadows into the three dimensional space of a bedroom - all in a way an audience could follow and understand visually.

Arguably the most inspiring and striking result what was trying to be achieved in this particular film is the depiction of the black hole, 'Gargantua'. After the collaboration between the film makers and the studio in combination with scientists such as Kip Thorne, the filmmakers wnated to properly show the behaviour of a black hole and a wormhole, right down to the lighting or lack of it. For the visual effects studio Double Negative, this became a whole other project by itself, causing them to create a whole new vastly complex renderer which was capable of handling this. The render was mostly complex in the physical sense, referring back to what made this so amazing for me at least, the fact that they were trying to envision a phenomena that exists but no one has ever seen, and may not be able to. A quote from Paul Franklin; “Kip was explaining to me the relativistic warping in space around a black hole,” “The gravity being bent in space/time deviated the light around it producing this thing called the Einstein lens which is this gravitational lens all around the black hole. I was thinking about how we might go about creating that image and I was thinking about ways or references we could look at and see if there was an existing VFX process.” Something I read about the film once is that Christopher Nolan did not want to include a green screen in his film, or atleast avoid it as much as possible. I recall him having a lot of the sets including the ships built in some sense and this continues into the imagery that the actors were interacting with. He didn't want the actors to be looking at green screen for imagery to be later projected onto them. It was early imagery used in the process of the CG black hole which was in fact used on set as projections, placed outside the windows of the spacecrafts. No greenscreen was used during production on Interstellar. Later on in the production process, Double Negative replaced a lot of these projections with star fields amongst other selected views.

Overall, this is another great example of how studios and film makers are pushing boundaries and breaking the norm when it comes to the use of CG in film and entertainment as a whole. Throguh the use of experts that weren't originally from the field of visual effects or having had a 3D background, different professionals were able to come together and create something incredible.