How Inception’s Astonishing Visuals Came to Life

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How Inception’s Astonishing Visuals Came to Life

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Paul Franklin specializes in turning the imaginary into reality. As the visual effects supervisor for Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and now Inception, Franklin is well-versed in helping directors like Christopher Nolan populate their cinematic worlds with larger-than-life computer-generated images.

However, in spite of Inception’s lush, physics-bending effects, Franklin’s work on Nolan’s cerebral sci-fi film was surprisingly measured.

“Some of the more spectacular imagery of the film — the street folding over in Paris, characters creating architecture out of thin air — are VFX shots that we created from a combination of live action and copious amounts of digital animation,” Franklin told Wired.com in a phone interview.

Wired.com spoke with Franklin about his experiences planning, crafting and polishing Inception’s dreamy visuals to work with Nolan’s fastidious brand of filmmaking.

(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)



Paul Franklin
Wired.com: Did most of your work on Inception end up being CG-based?
Paul Franklin: A lot of it was, but we used a miniature for a sequence featuring a giant, James Bond-like base out in the snow. At the end of sequence, in true action-movie style, we blow it up. The great thing about miniatures is they give you this chaotic reality that digital hasn’t quite gotten to yet. Using CG versions of complicated action like falling buildings, explosions or certain lighting effects are all predetermined by the nature of the software and the ideas that went into it. In the effects world, there’s still a lot of useful randomness in real-world physics.

Wired.com: How did you balance Nolan’s devotion to realism with the film’s patent unreality?

Franklin: That was the challenge on the VFX side. It was about remaining faithful to the “reality” that was shot on-set and using effects to subtly bend elements like physics, space and time. For instance, we have some great set pieces like a fight scene that takes place in zero-g. We built sequences like that to be very stylish, but not excessively stylized to hide effects work. Due to the amount of light and high-contrast images in Inception, we were very much committed to the same high standard of photorealism that we held for Batman Begins and Dark Knight.

Wired.com: Surely that made some of the grand illusions harder to pull off. Which one gave you the most trouble?

Franklin: By far, Limbo City at the end of the film. Part of the challenge was that this was an effect that continually developed during production. In the script, two characters wash up on a beach and look up at this incredible crumbling city. The city itself is definitely described as architecture, but it’s supposed to look like a natural landform.

Again, this is very easy to picture in your mind, but getting to the reality of what that should look like on film turned out to be a little more challenging. We went through the normal design process of having artists build concepts, and Chris laid out his ideal vision: Something glacial, with clear modernist architecture, but with chunks of it breaking off into the sea like icebergs.

For a long time we just couldn’t get it right — we’d end up with something that looked like an iceberg version of Gotham City with water running through it. So, what we came up with was a basic model of a glacier, and then one of the designers at Double Negative came up with a program that filled the open spaces with modernist architectural blocks. It was just a matter of methodically adding in elements like roads, intersections and ravines until we ended up with this extremely complicated (but organic-looking) cityscape.



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