Below you’ll find an awesome behind-the-scenes production featurette from Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion. It’s one I think is worth watching before you see the movie as it will heighten your appreciation for one of the environments in the film. It’s all about how the production made the cool choice to forego background compositing for the “Sky Tower” set and instead used front-projection and actual video footage taken from the top of a mountain.
This wouldn’t have been so extraordinary 10 or 15 years ago (much less 25 years ago), but in this day and age where even a low-rent network comedy uses extensive set extension and background compositing, it’s definitely notable. That’s not even mentioning the immeasurable benefit to the actors that a more realistic set generates.
This certainly doesn’t apply to each and every set, and it’s assured that they used heavy digital effects and correction throughout Oblivion as in any other VFX film of this scale, but for this very particular set you’ll see they pulled off some great images with a very old-school trick. I always love seeing cutting-edge technology and sophisticated applied to more primitive techniques.
This reminds me a bit of The Matrix, which used the biggest-ever cyclorama screen to create a skyline background in some of their high-rise sets.
2 comments
Damn. I want that rear-projection wrap-around screen for my living room.
One can now listen to the (full?) Oblivion soundtrack (streaming) by M83 here: http://mashable.com/2013/04/04/stream-the-oblivion-soundtrack/
Sounds pretty epic to me. My favorite track from a quick listen is Starwaves (which has been available to listen to even earlier). It reminds me of John Murphy’s score to Sunhine (one of my favorites) with some Vangelis and maybe Clint Mansell thrown in. I haven’t listened to all the tracks yet but what I’m hearing is pretty damn good (although there are some familiar touches form the Dark Knight and Inception scores from Zimmer, both of which seem to be copied in some way in almost every scifi or action film score these days). Still really enjoying this soundtack so far and it’s always nice to hear some new artists breaking into the film scoring world and bringing something new and original along. Also I love Kosinski’s decision to use someone else than just the most popular film music composers with Daft Punk scoring Tron Legacy (one of my favorite scores from recent years) and now M83 doing the music to Oblivion. I wonder who he’ll bring in to score The Dark Hole?
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