Gravity Visual Effects Featurette Is Jawdropping
This article is more than 2 years old
Months of build up and anticipation will culminate with the 86th Academy Awards this Sunday. While there are some fantastic movies nominated for Best Picture this year, including Her, American Hustle, The Wolf of Wall Street, and 12 Years a Slave, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is the frontrunner for a majority of the technical categories. It’s amazing to think about how much time and energy Cuarón and his production team put into Gravity to make the film a reality. The featurette above perfectly illustrates how the film went from green-screen performances to the finished product we saw on the big screen a few months ago.
You really don’t realize how much of Gravity is CGI until you watch the video above. It’s hard to imagine that a majority of Gravity‘s imagery was just Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in strange, white “space suits,” acting in front of a green-screen and trying to convey the fear of being lost in outer space. The production of Gravity alone is worth numerous Academy Awards when you consider that the movie actually looks like Cuarón took a camera crew into space.
It’s important to point out that the visual effects house Framestore was responsible for a majority of Gravity‘s digital wizardry. Framestore also worked on the visual effects for the movies Iron Man 3, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and the RoboCop remake.
Gravity is nominated for 10 Academy Awards (tied with American Hustle), including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Female Actor in a Leading Role for Sandra Bullock. The space epic is almost nominated for nearly every technical award too, except Best Costume Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Gravity is a big front-runner for everything else, including Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing, and especially Best Cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki, whose work on the film is just as valuable as Alfonso Cuarón and Sandra Bullock’s.
Gravity has already gathered a plethora of awards from critics’ groups, the Golden Globes, and the BAFTA Awards, and now it just has to get some Oscars under its belt. While the film is a giant among the technical categories, it’s likely that it will not win in any of the artistic ones, except for director. While Alfonso Cuarón is the front-runner in the directing category, you really can’t count out Alexander Payne, David O. Russell, Martin Scorsese, or Steve McQueen. For the Best Picture Oscar, it’s believed that 12 Years a Slave is still at the head of the pack, but Gravity and American Hustle are nipping at its heels.
Honestly, I am rooting for 12 Years a Slave or The Wolf of Wall Street to win Best Picture, but those films are considered “too challenging” for the award. A movie like Gravity perfectly falls in line with past Best Picture winners such as Titanic and The Lord of the Rings, so it won’t be surprising if Gravity ends up sweeping the Oscars.
The 86th Academy Awards airs on Sunday, March 2 on ABC.
