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Adventures in Zero Gravity VFX supervisors Matt Kasmir and Chris Lawrence detail their achievements in George Clooney’s well-received sci-fi drama The Midnight Sky.
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ovies about space travel have always provided visual effects artists with opportunities to push the medium in exciting new directions. The new Netflix feature The Midnight Sky, which is directed by and stars George Clooney, continues this time-honored tradition. The sci-fi drama is based on the book Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, which centers on a scientist and a young girl who embark on a journey across the Arctic to communicate to a returning space expedition that Earth has been destroyed by an ecological disaster. Emmy Award-nominated visual effects supervisor Matt Kasmir (Catch-22) and Oscar winner Chris Lawrence (Christopher Robin) helped bring Clooney’s project to realistic life. The emotional void felt by the terminally ill protagonist Augustine (Clooney) echoes the fate of the planet. As Kasmir points out, “We only ended up doing approximately 700 shots for the movie. It’s quite an intelligent drama that is emotionally captivating: It’s the opposite of our usual visual effects spectrum, which is a lot of things crashing around the place and aliens trying to eat everyone!” The team at VFX house Framestore looked
after the film’s signature spacewalk, the bloodletting, face replacements, and collaborated with production designer Jim Bissell (The Rocketeer) on conceptualizing and executing the spacecraft Aether. “I’d previously worked with Framestore and Chris Lawrence, who has done such great
work on Gravity and The Martian,” Kasmir points out. “It was a natural fit. Framestore London did the spacewalk, which was the single biggest effects sequence, and Framestore Montreal did the Arctic environment and a few additional space shots including the ‘Sick Earth.’” ILM was responsible for Augustine and
‘Shooting in zero-G is always difficult because it’s impossible to achieve it here on Earth without going into orbit … There are various well-known tricks that we use, like wirework and digital doubles.’ — VFX supervisor Chris Lawrence
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march 21
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