Director Alfonso Cuaron on set with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock
by Kyle Kull
Today I would like to start off a new issue of blog posts in which I select a recent film and discuss the various technical choices the directors and cinematographers used to capture their footage. Recently we reviewed the critically acclaimed film Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) (which can be viewed here: http://tinyurl.com/o7s9w44), which is a story about a woman trapped alone in space after a disaster at her space station. This is not meant to be another review of Gravity, but rather a glimpse into the world of the filmmaker and how they go about achieving what you as the audience inevitably see on the screen.
The Arri Alexa First, I will talk about the camera work used by Alfonso Cuarón and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who has worked with numerous influential directors such as Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men), Terrance Malick (Tree of Life), and The Coen Brothers (Burn After Reading). The camera they used primarily in the production of Gravity was the Arri Alexa, which was released in 2010 as the first digital camera created by the company Arri. This camera is incredibly popular with filmmakers and has made a groundbreaking impact on the recent film industry, being used on films such as The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011), and even Best Picture winner Argo (Ben Affleck, 2012). This camera was seen as an answer to the Red One, which showed remarkable popularity when it was originally released. Given that the setting for Gravity was mainly space, and therefore required a large amount of digital post-production editing, the Arri Alexa was a smart choice for Cuarón and Lubezki, giving them a reliable machine to shoot stunning footage as well as give versatility to the VFX directors. Cuarón and Lubezki also used the Arri 765, which shoots on celluloid instead of digital, for the final shots of the film which took place on Earth, to provide some contrast and noticeable difference from the fluidity of space.
Alfonso Cuarón's vision would not have been possible if it were not for the quality of VFX today. An interesting fact that shocked me about Gravity was the percentage of CGI that was used for the final completed film. While Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), a film that was praised for its groundbreaking use of CGI and VFX production, had about 60% of the total image in computer graphics, Gravity had 80%, significantly more than almost any feature film to date. There is a specific reason for this fact: for almost every space sequence in the film, the only part of the original image that was used in the completed film were Bullock's and Clooney's faces. Otherwise, the picture was created digitally in post-production. This use of VFX was remarkable, because it allowed a talented writer and director like Alfonso Cuarón to create a visualization that without the advanced technology of digital filmmaking would not have been possible.
When examining the production of a film, you need to look at the production of sound as well as the production of the image. In analyzing Gravity, it is immediately obvious that Cuarón was aware of the environment that he was trying to replicate, which is specifically seen in his use of sound in the film. Besides the voices of the two actors through their headsets, the sounds of the explosions and the breaking of various space parts that are accompanying the characters, there is no background noise present in the film. Cuarón did his research and understood that because space is simply one giant vacuum, and there is no atmosphere, sound does not travel when you are in the great beyond. In order to combat the dull nature of space due to the lack of noise, Cuarón provides a soundtrack composed by Steven Price.
I hope you found this article interesting and informative about some of the processes and technical machinery that filmmakers use by taking a behind-the-scenes look at the production of Gravity. Later I will continue this in looking at some other recent productions in order to give you a more complete view on how filmmakers create what you see on the screen. To get a closer look at some of the points I described above, watch the video below. Be sure to leave your comments on what you think about what I discussed in this article.
I hope you found this article interesting and informative about some of the processes and technical machinery that filmmakers use by taking a behind-the-scenes look at the production of Gravity. Later I will continue this in looking at some other recent productions in order to give you a more complete view on how filmmakers create what you see on the screen. To get a closer look at some of the points I described above, watch the video below. Be sure to leave your comments on what you think about what I discussed in this article.
