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Behind the Special Effects of Inception
Lanxon writes "Wired has a behind the scenes look at how Inception's reality-distorting special effects sequences were shot, in an interview with Chris Corbould — the man 'prized for his ability to stage a real-life tank chase in St. Petersburg (GoldenEye), to flip a working juggernaut down a narrow Chicago street (The Dark Knight), and to build a working Batmobile that can do 30-metre jumps without the aid of a single post-production pixel.'" Hopefully most of you who intend to see Inception have already seen it by now, so you don't have to worry about spoilers. It's getting pretty much universal praise.
Just kidding. No one knows what the hell happened.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
Once again, all inclinations to boycott the MPAA go out the window the moment the next summer flick comes out.
I assumed the gravity special effects were all CG, but it's great to know they were done physically!
Wired has a behind the scenes look at how Inception's reality-distorting special effects sequences were shot
That's easy, the just shot the whole movie with an iPhone 4 and invited Steve Jobs to the set.. all the reality distortion you'll ever need!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Here's the spoiler: The Slashdot summary is about as long as the article it links to. WTF? Who allows crap like this to get on the front page?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It sounds good. But why should I go to the theater when I have a perfectly good theater here at home? I think it's funny that everyone assumes "if you want to see it, you have by now." Going to the theater is expensive and not as positive an experience as watching movies at home. I understand paying a premium to watch live theater but we should be well past the "pay per seat experience" when it comes to movies. Going to the theater is just propping up outdated business models. And some of us have matured beyond the "I will pay a premium to see it when it is NEW!" and into the "I will see it when I get around to it and it's cheap" stage of life.
That said, special effects are cool.
There wasn't hardly anything in the way of special effects in "Memento," and not much in "The Prestige." Yet those were his two best films and much better than this. "Inception" isn't *bad*, mind you. But the fact that people are concentrating so much on its visual effects is probably a good sign that the script isn't strong enough to carry the movie by itself. Everyone walked out of "Memento" way more blown away than they were from this movie, and no one was saying it was because of the cool FX. The farther away Nolan gets from Batcycles and FX, the more he has to concentrate on the script. And that's a good thing.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I remember wanting to see this movie months before it came out. Then, when I'm finally seeing it in IMAX on release day, I start thinking "wow this movie is actually kinda boring so far" except for the effects in the first hour maybe of the movie. It was particularly funny hearing everyone in the theater say "OHHH THAT'S THE SCENE FROM THE TRAILER." like they thought they were amazingly perceptive or something
THEN, they actually start the heist and the levels....and the fight scenes with Gordon-Levitt, and I was completely blown away. It went from being a possible snore fest to the best movie I have ever seen in my life, and the beginning was justified because it explains the later parts. What a freaking roller coaster ride, movie of the decade (for me at least) absolutely.
With the worldwide glut of computing power out there, why would you want to spend all that time and effort setting things up in the real world? How long will it be before someone takes the power of BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) grid computing, and the talent of those who made 405: The movie (http://www.405themovie.com/Home.asp) and produce something beyond anything Hollywood has dreamed of?
I need trepanation like I need a hole in the head.
You don't have to worry about spoilers because there aren't any. This is a painfully brief blurb from July 8th, before the movie was released, and only directly makes reference to a few scenes in the trailer.
Which is disappointing because I was really hoping for something of substance. The "article" spends more time talking about Courbould's other projects than Inception.
Did anyone else notice that it looked like Gordon Levitt had wires attached to his pants during the hallway fight where he's dancing around the walls during the fight? The preview picture of the article makes it seem like they were rotating the hallway itself so why would the wires have been attached the whole time as well? I specifically remember some scenes where the wires shouldn't have been needed if the entire hallways was rotating.
This is a bit off topic, but all you /.ers need to see this movie, if for no other reason than that it is an allegory for memory management, stack frames, orphaned pointers, etc.
Y'all're being way too literal - whether the top fell or it didn't, the point of the last shot isn't whether the reality Cobb is in is real or not, the point is that he walked away from the top as it was spinning. He stopped trying to get home because, as far as he was concerned, he was as home as he wanted to be.
Whether the reality we, as an audience, left him in was "real" or not is completely immaterial. Home != reality, necessarily; he ended up where he needed to be.
What on earth is a "working juggernaut"?
But I would just like to say, thanks for not posting any spoilers in the summary.
Snape kills Dumbledore.
So many people, including my wife, said they just didn't get it. I must really be in the minority, because I thought that it had a similar "wow" factor as "The Matrix", only with plot instead of special effects. I remember watching "The Matrix", and at the scene where Neo got unplugged, I had this overwhelming feeling of "Oh, my, god! I get it! This is so absolutely innovatively cool!" I really had the same feeling when watching Inception. And maybe my delight with it has to do with the fact that I am able to have lucid dreams on occasion. I specifically remember one where I woke up from a dream, somehow realized that I was still dreaming, and then woke up from that. Having personally experienced that made the concept at least understandable.
Granted, it wasn't a perfect movie, and it was probably too long, but I really think it had an innovative depth that hasn't been seen in movies in a long time.
I also feel that though the SFX were cool, this is a movie you really don't need to see on the big screen. The plot carries it well. The wow-factor doesn't come from the SFX, it comes from the plot.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
MUCH more informative than the original linked article plus more pics!
I like microcars
Here
A lot of critics liked it, but quite a few, including Rex Reed and David Edelstein destroyed it. I'm with them, personally. It seems to be fairly polarizing.
Hopefully most of you who intend to see Inception have already seen it by now
Cmdr Taco, do you realize maybe half of Slashdot audience is *NOT* from the USA?
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
mal is alive in the real world... and she's trying to wake cobb up...
"Film has an enormous amount of exposure latitude and dynamic range, which gives us infinite creative flexibility in creating images... Every digital camera is trying hard to emulate 35mm film, and there's a reason for that."
This is why film, until some monumental change in digital photography occurs, will always be better.
It's quite telling looking at photos taken on film (Kodachrome included) from the past and those now taken on digital. The film photos have a much more pleasing aspect than the digital version.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Not as great as everyone is making it out to be, but still an original and entertaining film
The plot was largely contrived, and an ounce of sense would have taken this team of "experts" a long way toward accomplishing their goal.
Here come the spoilers, as I highlight the nonsense:
it is explained in the film that shared dreamers may each "project" new energy and physical matter into the dream world if they so choose.
The reason this is avoided is because the root dreamers subconscious will start to detect it's being fiddled with, and all of their projections will become violent.
Certainly I can accept this premise, but it falls flat once they enter fischers subconscious and discover he has been trained to resist them.
The crew is ambushed, as trained military persons are firing semi-automatic weapons and constantly pursuing them.
Fischer is tied up in a room, alone and out of view, and none of the crew actually take advantage of the fact that they're in a dream.
A friend is shot and dieing, but nobody summons an ER doctor or staff. Their actual lives are threatened, but they do not transform their van to be bulletproof or into a tank.
For god sakes this guy is about to die, which is leo's only hope of seeing his children. I would have said hey look there is a futuristic alien healing device here!
Why not change reality? Are they afraid that the highly trained soldiers that are already trying to kill them are going to notice their presence and then start.. trying to kill them?
Later in the arctic, when the entire crew and fischer are in on the fact that it's a dream, they start freaking out because they only have an hour to get to their destination.
100% of the people in this dream are equipped with automatic weapons and already trying to kill them.
Still, nobody uses any dream powers. For god sakes, everyone knows it's a dream. Summon a flying tank. Put on an Iron Man suit.
What a bunch of idiots. If I wanted to watch people this stupid I would turn on reruns of bevis and butthead.
This was an excellent opportunity to do some great, fast action, special effects but instead they completely passed and kept things fairly grounded to the rules of our reality.
I was disappointed and expected the action sequences to be a lot sexier.
If your plot line only advances because your characters are too stupid to leverage the very powers that make them unique, then your plot is sorely lacking.
How can you have a movie in a dream-world that your characters control, and then have nobody leverage that control? Epic WTF.
Still it was unique and different and I wasn't bored.
if you think it is a dream, you need to ask what make his dream accurately reflect that he was on board a plane?
Remember that this guys subconscience is stuck at level 4 or limbo, you need to unwind the dreams (or pop the stack) to know where you are before you fall into your dream. How come a dream at level 4 or in limbo (top of the stack) pop the dream stack and know the bottom of the stack?
You need to go back to reality to know that you are on board a plan, right?
This notion: "Of course, mimicking the weight and feel of the top would require someone else had touched to totem before"
This whole movie is about people with the ability to go into dreams, and then steal real-world knowledge and ideas from the dreamer
It's absolute nonsense that you wouldn't be able to go into a dream, and then steal the knowledge of their totem.
what..? you can steal their deepest and darkest secrets, but you can't steal knowledge about some knick-knack?
How does that make any sense at all?
...about kicks, limbo and sedatives. Here is all the dialog about those topics for everyone who will "remember" a character saying something they never said:
Sedation/Kicks:
Arthur: Three layers down, dreams are going to collapse with the slightest disturbance
Yusuf: Sedation. For sleep stable enough to create three layers of dreaming we'll have to combine it with extremely powerful sedatives.
[Yusuf slaps a sleeping Arthur who doesn't wake up.]
Yusuf: The compound we'll be using to share the dream creates a very clear connection between dreamers whilst actually accelerating brain function.
Cobb: In other words, it gives us more time on each level.
Yusuf: Brain function in the dream will be about twenty times normal. Now when you enter a dream within that dream the effect will be compounded. There's three dreams. 10 hours to...
Eames: I'm sorry, math was never my strong subject. So h-how much time is that?
Cobb: It's a week the first level down. Six months, the second level down. Third level is...
Ariadne: 10 years!
[Cobb nods]
Ariadne: Who'd want to be stuck in a dream for 10 years?
Yusuf: Depends on the dream.
Arthur: So, once we've made the plant, how do we get out? I'm hoping you have something more elegant in mind than shooting me in the head?
Cobb: Kick.
Ariadne: What's a kick?
Eames: This, Ariadne, would be a kick.
[Eames nudges Arthur's chair that is on two legs and Arthur loses balance but catches himself before he falls.]
Cobb: It's that feeling of falling you get that jolts you awake. It snaps you out of the dream.
Arthur: Are we going to feel a kick with this kind of sedation?
Yusuf: Ah! That's the clever part. I customized the sedative to leave inner ear function unimpaired. That way, however deep the sleep, the sleeper still feels falling...
[Yusuf pushes a sleeping Arthur over in a chair. Arthur awakes]
Yusuf: or tipping...
[Yusuf tips a sleeping Arthur over in a chair. Arthur awakes]
Cobb: The trick is to synchronize a kick that can penetrate all three levels.
Arthur: We could use the musical countdown to synchronize the different kicks.
Limbo: ...if we die in a dream we wake up.
Cobb: Don't do that. Don't do that!
Eames: He's in agony, I'm waking him up.
Cobb: No. It won't wake him up.
Eames: What do you mean it won't wake him up...
Cobb: It won't wake him up.
Eames:
Yusuf: Not from this. We're too heavily sedated to wake up that way.
Eames: Right. So what happens when we die?
Cobb: We drop into limbo.
Arthur: Are you serious?!
Ariadne: Limbo?!
Arthur: Unconstructed dream space.
Ariadne: Well, what the hell is down there?
Arthur: Just raw, infinite subconscious. Nothing is down there. Except for whatever might have been left behind by anyone sharing the dream who's been trapped there before. Which in our case is just you.
Ariadne: Well, how long can we be stuck there?
Yusuf: Can't even think about trying to escape until the sedation...
Eames: How long?!
Yusuf: Decades. It could be infinite. I don't know. Ask him. He's the one who's been there.
Arthur: Let's get him upstairs.
Saito:
Eames: Great... Thank you. So now we are trapped in Fischer's mind battling his own private army and if we get killed we'll be lost in limbo till our brains turn to scrambled egg.
More Limbo: ...filled with regret... ...waiting to die alone.
Cobb: How's he doing?
Ariadne: He's in a lot of pain.
Cobb: When we get down to the lower levels, his pain will be less intense.
Ariadne: And if he dies?
Cobb: Worst case scenario: when he wakes up his mind is completely gone.
Saito: Cobb. I'll still honor the arrangement.
Cobb: I appreciate that Saito, but when you wake up you won't even remember that we had an arrangement. Limbo's going to become your reality, you're gonna be lost down there so long that you're going to become an old man...
Saito:
Cobb:
Saito: No. I'll come back. And we'll be yo
Because I think that would add a new spin to yet another fx story.
No - the top was wobbling and about to fall.
The top had been spinning WAY too long at that point for reality to be in effect.
Towards the beginning of the Inception, before he explains the significance of the top, he does a test where the top seemed to take unnaturally slow to stop. So even then I was thinking "Wow, cool top." But when I noticed the gun I realized what he was doing.
Weighted correctly and spun properly, a top can go on for a while. Not minutes/hours, but for what appears unnaturally long.
The fact that it started to wobble at the end was just a nice "it's whatever you want it to be." Maybe it was going to stop a second later, maybe it wasn't.
In the end, I can't say whether the final scene was a dream. Heck, I've heard good arguments that the whole thing was a dream since his interactions with everyone at the end could've been those of complete strangers: a glance, a nod, etc.
I found it very "Total Recall," specifically the white light at the end of that film.
Say what you will about the mindless action and "Ah-nold" factor in "Total Recall," it did make you think. Everything the "bad guys" said would happen, happened. The story he wanted to download "Blue Skies of Mars" matched the movie's plot quite well. Not a single thing really proved one way or the other if he was awake or in a dream.
And at the end, as hinted earlier, there's a bright light. The camera cutting away? Or Ah-nold waking up from the experience?
However with Recall, the whole movie was questioning whether the main character was awake. Inception only made you truly question it at the end.
no, Nolan's trick was to make you feel you enjoyed paying $9 to see that movie.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think this brings up the age old question:
Was it only a dream at the end of... Total Recall.
I got sucked in by the hype that there is a spectacular surprise twist at the end. There isn't. Some of the special effects are quite interesting. Otherwise, this is a very conventional action movie. Not a bad movie, but certainly not anything special.
This has been my opinion which, to most of you, won't be worth much.
Saw it for the second time last night and when Old-Saito spins the top it is shown spinning perfectly still in place, at the end it's noisy and wobbly, having spun for quite a while and so is about to topple.
Also, the group dream on the plane was nearing an end and the train incident showed that dying in limbo would wake you up, not send you to deeper limbo, so when Old-Saito picks up the gun it's to shoot Cobb and then himself.
That's my interpretation, YMMV, on both viewings I was perfectly satisfied that he was awake and that the cut to black was just Nolan fucking with us.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
If you forget the ending and look at the rest of the movie as a whole it makes sense the backstory and emotional journey is tied up, the mission is complete and that Saito honoured the agreement with both he and Cobb jointly remembering the conversation they had in the warehouse. The whole plot of the film is nicely tied up and resolved. Though interestingly Saito only said Cobb would have no trouble getting through customs, not that he'd make all the charges go away, but besides, there seems to be a cultural phenomenon where if a film has a happy ending it's somehow a Bad Thing, what's that about?
Anyway, in the immediate prior scene the top is shown on Saito's Limbo Table spinning indefinitely, very smoothly and without a sound. On the table at the end it's making a fair bit of noise and is distinctly about to fall. The cut before it does is just Mr Nolan messing with us.
On the other hand, remember that the whole film is essentially a dream, as in it's a movie, a work of fiction designed by an architect and into which we were drawn...
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
This is not your usual unit shifting mega star summer blockbuster. This is a damned good film made by a bloody good director who's worked hard within the system enough to be able to negotiate enough cash and freedom to make whatever movie he pleases. THIS is what we want more of. Not Piranha 3D
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
:) Kudos to you, parent!
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Dreams provide unlimited potential for screenwriters. Dreams are the penultimate plot device; shared dreaming being the ultimate.
.."
..making it possible to increase the depth of the plot device threefold.
For example:
Yousef the human pharmacy creates the ultimate sedative..
Yousef: "Ah! That's the clever part. I customized the sedative
And then, via the plot device, adds extreme danger to the character's situation:
Yusuf: Not from this. We're too heavily sedated to wake up that way.
Eames: Right. So what happens when we die?
Cobb: We drop into limbo.
Ah, limbo, worse than death.
Anyhow, very cleverly written, very suspenseful, etc. My question is about the zero gravity scenes in the hallway and elevator shaft. Was that all done via cables or did they put the whole thing in the vomit comet and actually go low gravity? It doesn't look like cables. I don't remember if anyone had hair that wasn't slicked back in those scenes. That would be indicative. But I'm assuming that if they did film those scenes in a bouncy airplane, they would have told someone about it I find the article lacking in content. Yes they made a box that rotates. And used liquid nitrogen for explosions?
ok, so caps subject was unwarranted but I get it now. In the movie Cobb has woken up and is visiting his real family. The reason we don't get to see the spinning top fall is because it's not reality: It's a movie, it's taking place in Nolan's head.
It's fucking Meta
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.