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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
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.
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.
I think the phrase you are looking for is that "not once have you ever seen a CGI-rendered scene that you could identify as CGI-rendered that did not look CGI-rendered."
The ones that didn't look utterly fake looked real enough for you to assume that they were real. That's kind of the whole point, you see.
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!
I'm an unemployed juggernaut, you insensitive clod!
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
...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