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Visual Effects ■ ■ ■ ■ Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures. modern standards, we didn’t have a huge shot count,” Franklin says. “We had a modest 500 shots; but, it was 34 to 40 minutes of screen time.” Although Dneg altered reality in the real world for a few shots by adding passing views of a landscape outside a bullet train, for example, most of the studio’s eff ects involved altering environments inside the dream world. Even so, Nolan wanted those environments to look and feel real. “T ere’s a large amount of sophisticated visual eff ects work,” Franklin says, “and what distinguishes it is Chris’s strong aesthetic grounding in reality. He says the audience has to believe it’s a fi lmed image, not syn- thetic.” So, even if a shot doesn’t call for a plate, the team will still shoot something real for reference. Paris in the Dream Time In the fi rst part of the fi lm, we learn that Cobb, accused of murdering his wife, is on the run. He’s an extractor, someone who uses futuristic dream sharing to invade the subconscious of sleeping targets to steal information from their minds. Corporations hire him to do industrial espionage. But one industrial magnate has a diff erent idea: Rather than steal ideas, he wants Cobb to invade the dreams of a rival and plant an idea. Cobb agrees and hires a team that includes the brilliant student of architecture, Ariadne, who will design dreamspaces the team will share with their target. As she learns how dream sharing works, the fi rst series of eff ects take place. We see her and Cobb sitting outside at a café in Paris, discussing dream August/September 2010 11