Gravity will always be considered as one of the Top Notch VFX Extravaganza. The opening uncut, continuous camera shot of 17 minutes (insane for VFX and Cinematography) in Zero-G sets the stage for uncompelling visual treat ahead in the story and it stands true on it. It’s the best stereo movie after ‘Avatar’.
Enjoy the VFX based Gravity movie review.
Alfonso Cuarón, The Director, has entwined the story very beautifully with seamless VFX integration by the Visual Effects Giant – Framestore. Hell lot of destruction and edge-of-the-seat VFX never felt so amazing without loud audio effects. Emmanuel Lubezki‘s cinematography is at its best. This is the strong candidate for tons of award categories in Oscars 2014.
Hats off to Tim Webber and his team at Framestore studio to pushing the limits for Visual Storytelling. It all started with very strong Previs (Pre Visualization). Once the entire technical team approved it, they started the primary shooting. LED ‘Light Box’ (Pre Lighting) was the major innovation for the movie to calculate light and projection over the characters. It provided 1,800,000 individual lights than can be controlled manually to stimulate real life lighting. The ‘IRIS Robotic Camera Rig’ was used for ‘gravity less’ shooting capture.
For so many complex shots, Framestore used Digital Doubles of both the actors for partial / full body replacement. For face close up shots, they were tightly rotoscoped for perfect output using VFX and Compositing softwares Fusion and Nuke. Prime Focus worked for 3D Conversion shots through their native View-D pipeline. FX of Debris was mostly coded in Maya. All the 3D elements were rendered in stereo by Framestore. The Rendering pipeline shifted to Arnold from RenderMan for robust control because of its unmatched memory management techniques.
George Clooney and Sandra Bullock are at their best. ‘Miss Congeniality’ looks drop dead gorgeous in short hair. She looks so fresh. Clooney fits the role of story teller with his infectious charm. “Houston, I Have a Bad Feeling about This Mission” – is one of the catchiest lines from his character.
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The girl sitting besides me in the theater, must be 24 to 26 years old, was a big fan of Clooney. There was an altogether different romantic story was getting formed here. She wanted to be with Clooney on his spacewalk. Girls !!!
The toy of Marvin the Martian going out of scattered shuttle – is one of the best nuances of the movie. It’s truly a remarkable movie experience. I would recommend all of you to see it in 3D only.