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'Oblivion' Featurette Spotlights Practical Effects

The Creators Project goes behind the scenes of Universal’s sci-fi epic, “Oblivion,” with a close-up look at the in-camera effects created for the film.

The Creators Project goes behind the scenes of Universal’s sci-fi epic, Oblivion, directed by Joseph Kosinski and starring Tom Cruise, with a close-up look at the effects for the film that were created in-camera.

While the effects for the film certainly weren't exclusively practical, in-camera effects were used as much as possible in order to add visual integrity to the film's aesthetic.

In the film aliens have nearly destroyed Earth and Tom Cruise is one of the last remaining people still living there, albeit thousands of miles above the surface in a sky tower, heading down sporadically to mine the planet's resources.

In the video below, director Joe Kosinski, lead graphics animator David “dlew” Lewandowski, and design director Bradley “Gmunk” Munkowitz talk about how they created this futuristic world-in-the-sky and the technology that features in it.

Relying heavily on in-camera techniques meant shooting the film on location in a remote part of Iceland, building spaceships, using projected cloudscapes as views for the sky tower, and creating working computer screens (using the glass-based, geometric user interface style that is Gmunk's signature) that the actors could actually interact with in real-time. ”Visually you're able to capture something that I just don't think you can create digitally,” says Kosinski.

Watch the video, and check out Gmunk's GFX montage below:

Source: The Creators Project

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.

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