? Gravity begins with an unforgettable 13 minutes of uninterrupted footage of the Earth as it is viewed from space, while the sunlit space station and three astronauts in spacesuits come into view. Suddenly, a massive amount of debris from an exploding satellite comes hurtling in and hits the station, killing one of the astronauts and leaving the other, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), and medical engineer Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), floating in space with no one else to turn to. The rest of the movie is about them trying to save themselves by any means necessary, trying to get to the nearest space station while facing the threat of dwindling oxygen.
? The 3D movie contains a lot of long shots and fluid camera movements, making the beautiful and dangerous space environment more realistic and detailed. It's a level that director Alfonso Cuarón, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, visual effects director Tim Webber, and their team have achieved after a five-year-long collaboration.Cuarón and Lubezki are longtime friends who have worked together on six films, including So Is Your Mother and Children of Men, the latter of which was directed by Tim Webber as visual effects director.
Lubezki claims that only the faces of the actors under their helmets were shot in real life during the outer space scenes in Gravity, which makes the film all the more memorable technically and aesthetically. Everything else in the outer space scene, including the spacesuits, the space station, and the Earth, was CG. Similarly, there's a scene in which a spacesuit-less Stone floats over a spaceship, and Bullock is suspended from a wire on set, while her surroundings are digitally created.
The space environment setting called for the lighting design session to include three main sources of light: distant hard sunlight, soft light reflected from the Earth and occasional reflected light from the moon. "This setting is neither like what real outer space looks like nor what it looks like inside a space station," Lubezki said, "where one is confronted with pitch blackness and can only see part of the sun, part of the Earth, and occasionally the moon. If that were the case, a 100-minute film wouldn't be as compelling, so Alfonso and I decided to keep changing the lighting."
The shooting techniques used were:
1. Trajectory design - Framestore
Cuarón worked with the Framestore team to develop the trajectory of the film's motion above the Earth, which would dictate how the Earth would look in the film.
2. Previs -
Framestore
Cuarón and Lubezki worked with a team of animators to create a low-resolution animated preview version of the movie. Includes virtual camera movement.
3. Pre-Lighting Design - Framestore
Lubezki worked with a team of technical directors to design the lighting effects for each virtual scene in the film, with CG assets optimized for fast rendering and feedback.
4. Pre-DI
Using two separate, precisely calibrated DI screening rooms, one in Los Angeles and one in London, Cuarón, Lubezki, Director of Digital Coloring J. Scott, and Director of Visual Effects Tim Webber refined the color-coding schemes for each of the film's four segments, working in a real-time environment. The results of the color grading were exported (sometimes just a single frame) and sent to Framestore to be used as a reference frame for the final shot visuals.
5. Techvis -
Framestore
The Previs and pre-lighting design data will be used to set up the camera trajectory and lighting parameters to simulate each character's subjective perspective in the film.
6. Live action in the LED lightbox - Shepperton