Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/426320
n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 4 c g w 1 3 some artifacts, and in some, we replaced the in-camera images with newer, better material. But a significant amount of the images shot on the set made it into the movie. I was blown away by how it looked. The un- expected thing is that the cast responded to these images." During filming, when the actors looked out the window of the spaceship, they could see and react to light bending around a black hole. "They all said how much they appreciated having these images," Franklin says. "I think it allowed them to get into the awe and majesty and the scale of the concepts we were dealing with in the film. That was fascinating." To make this possible, the images being projected had to be precisely aligned with the set. The crew moved the Barco projectors into position on forklis; each projector weighed approximately 600 pounds. T I M E T R A V E L To wrangle the digital projectors, Franklin used the Los Angeles company Background Images, which specialized in on-set projections for live events. "We made it clear that we would have 15 minutes to set up the projectors for the next shot," Franklin says. "They thought we were kidding. They usually took a week. But they rose to the challenge and gave us a fantastic result. For one of the final scenes, we had 17 or 18 projectors running simultaneously on the set, all being moved on a setup-by- setup basis." In that third act, Matthew McConaughey as Cooper, the hero of the film, enters an exotic space built for him by a mysterious power, a space in which the fourth dimension, time, has turned into a physi- cal dimension. "Chris [Nolan] wanted to give the set life with events flowing backward and forward," Franklin says. "We projected animated maps that precisely conformed to different parts of the set, which was very complicated." "Matthew is floating in a void surrounded by horizontal lines, the stretched-out timelines from objects in his past," Franklin continues. "You'll see flickering information racing along those lines. We projected light patterns onto the lines that resolved into objects at certain points in the set. It was quite abstract. It was extraordinary. There was a sense that at one level, Inception was an art house movie. This takes that idea further. For me, it's the most powerful scene in the movie." Sometimes, Franklin and his crew created new images on- set to put onto the projectors before the camera rolled. The visual effects artists were, in fact, creating content for the film on the stage.