Interstellar wins the Academy Award^®!

Following on from their win at the BAFTAs last week, DNEG VFX Supervisors Paul Franklin and Andrew Lockley (along with New Deal VFX Supervisor Ian Hunter and SFX Supervisor Scott Fisher) picked up the Academy Award® for Best Visual Effects for Christopher Nolan’s *Interstellar at Sunday’s star-studded awards ceremony in L.A.

The DNEG crew, under the leadership of Paul Franklin (Interstellar’s Overall VFX Supervisor) and Andrew Lockley (DNEG’s Internal VFX Supervisor) were tasked with the challenge of accurately depicting the film’s wormhole, it’s supermassive black hole (Gargantua), the Tesseract (a four dimensional space allowing time to be seen as a physical dimension), digital space vistas for projection on-set (no greenscreen was used in any of the space sequences), robots TARS and CASE and the population of alien worlds with giant waves and landscapes of frozen cloud and ice.

DNEG’s work with leading astrophysicist Professor Kip Thorne (Interstellar’s Science Advisor and Executive Producer) in creating the most accurate depiction of a blackhole and wormhole yet seen, has subsequently led to the recent publication of two scientific papers: The Interstellar team turning science fiction into science fact by providing new insights into the powerful effects of black holes.

The win follows on from 2011 Academy success for DNEG when Paul Franklin and Andy Lockley were on stage with fellow DNEG Supervisor Pete Bebb to collect the Oscar® for their work on Christopher Nolan’s Inception.