Interstellar black hole

Working together with a prominent astrophysicist (Kip Thorne), the film's visual effects team created what may be the first scientifically accurate display of a black hole on the big screen. To fully realize director Christopher Nolan's vision for "Interstellar," visual effects studio Double Negative was tasked to "produce images of things that aren’t even in our dimension, and furthermore have them accurate to not only quantum physics and relativistic laws, but also our best understanding (guess) of quantum gravity.”

Thorne shared his knowledge of black holes, and how he envisioned they would appear. Instead of the typical movie version of a black hole, which is depicted as a breach within space, Thorne’s research indicated black holes might be more like three-dimensional spheres. The physical appearance of Thorne's black holes is colorfully described in an interview with Paul Franklin in the Warner Brothers behind-the-scenes video "Interstellar: Building A Black Hole" (below):

Interstellar's Black Hole

Last night I watched Interstellar for the first time. I was blown away by the amazing depiction of space, the black hole, and the worm hole in the film. It's no surprise that the film was the winner of the 2015 Oscar for Visual Effects.

It took the VFX team hundreds of hours of tedious work to produce such a stunning product. Black holes have such a strong gravity field that light literally cannot escape them, and light that is surrounding black holes is bent and distorted. Filmmakers often use a technique called ray tracing to render light and reflections in images. "Ray-tracing software makes the generally reasonable assumption that light is traveling along straight paths." Generating the proper light effect as VFX was a difficult task for the team. Eugenie von Tunzelmann, a CG supervisor at Double Negative said this about their work, "We had to write a completely new renderer." Some frames took over 100 hours to render with such complex light systems in place. However, it was all worth it in the end. The visual effects alone are worth the money to see this movie. See the full article by Adam Rogers, from Wired, here.

Harry Potter

Earlier I was thinking about the Harry Potter movies, and how much compositing was done in those films. Because it is a fantasy world, there are so many different elements that needed to be added using special and visual effects. In looking for information about that, I found an article about the compositing process in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It talks about the companies that worked on the effects for the movie, and some of the different steps that went into making the effects. The part about rotoscoping for the room of requirements scene was interesting because it showed the types of challenges that they face in post.