Time flies… yes, we know it’s all relative, but here on Earth it’s been 10 years since Christopher Nolan’s visionary Interstellar released in theatres!
It was such an honour to serve as the visionary director’s VFX partner on this acclaimed sci-fi film – and to be recognised with the award for ‘Best Visual Effects’ for our work by both the Academy and BAFTA!
Enjoy just a few of our favourite shots in the reel below, then scroll for a closer look at our team’s incredible achievements on the film:
“It’s no surprise that the film won this year’s Academy Award® for Best Visual Effects. The Interstellar visual effects team truly pushed the boundaries of reality, vividly expanding our perception of the future — and what lies beyond our planet.”
– Deja Collins, SIGGRAPH.org
Interstellar marked our fifth collaboration with acclaimed director Christopher Nolan. Our talented crew contributed to the film’s most pivotal sequences, including the creation of the Tesseract (the four dimensional space allowing time to be seen as a physical dimension), the space craft Endurance, the robots TARS and CASE, and the alien world landscapes of massive waves, frozen clouds and ice. Additionally, to avoid using a greenscreen in any of the space sequences, the team crafted digital space vistas for projection on-set.
“Staggeringly beautiful, bafflingly complex, this is proper event cinema.”
– Wendy Ide, Times (UK)
One of our most significant contributions was the film’s wormhole and supermassive black hole, for which we were honoured to partner with leading astrophysicist Professor Kip Thorne (Interstellar’s Science Advisor and Executive Producer) to create the most accurate depiction of a blackhole and wormhole yet seen – which resulted in the publication of two scientific papers!
Dive behind the scenes of our work in this featurette from Warner Bros., featuring Kip and Overall VFX Supervisor Paul Franklin:
“A soulful, must-see masterpiece, one of the most exhilarating film experiences so far this century.”
– Lou Lumenick, New York Post
Reminiscing on his work, DNEG VFX Supervisor Andy Lockley said:
“Hard to believe it’s been ten years — the memories are still so vivid! Interstellar was a massive challenge, both technically and creatively, but we were lucky to have some of the best minds and eyes in the world on our team. The way these disciplines merged so seamlessly gave rise to some of the most breathtaking images ever put on screen. Grounded in real physics (thanks, Kip Thorne!), they carried an even greater impact. Interstellar set a new standard, proving that digital VFX, blended with classic analog techniques, could not only elevate storytelling but offer incredibly accurate glimpses of our universe and the futures we were yet to see.”
Oliver James (DNEG Chief Scientist) added:
“Working on the movie Interstellar was one of the highlights of my career. It’s one of those movies where every department pulled out all the stops to create something exceptional. My small contribution was in creating the simulation of the black hole and wormhole in a collaboration between the film’s scientific advisor, Kip Thorne and my research team at DNEG. This collaboration was an intense year where we put our heads together and ground through hundreds of equations to get the simulations right. DNEG’s artists were able to explore this strange volume of warped spacetime, in the way a location scout might explore an exotic location, and this led to the extraordinary images in the movie. The combination of these images, created with scientific rigour, and forming the backdrop to Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece seemed to have a profound effect: almost overnight, the popular conception of a black hole being some sort of whirlpool in space was replaced with the image from the film.”
“We are still pioneers. We’ve barely begun. Our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because they’re above us.”
– Interstellar (2014)
Learn more about our work on the film here.