Secrets of space: the Oscar-winning effects of Gravity revealed

By Marc Chacksfield
It is hard for a blockbuster nowadays to deliver the all-important 'wow' factor. Audiences in the 21st century have been conditioned to expect expensive special effects - so much so that they are only usually noticed now if they fall short of being exceptional.

When it comes to Gravity, though, it was not the audience's expectations that had to be met but that of the director's.

And with good reason: at the Oscars this week, Gravity won seven Academy awards - including Best Director, Best Visual Effects and Best Sound Editing. But Alfonzo Cuaron's view of space isn't just multi award-winning but groundbreaking too.

Cuaron is a director that has been obsessed with space for most of his life, so when it came to delivering his 'space' movie it had to be unlike anything that had come before it.

The effects Cuaron wanted to achieve simply didn't exist so he needed to consult a team of effects artists to achieve the impossible and bring his unique Oscar-winning version of space to screens.

This is where Framestore came in. Famed for bringing the likes of Iron Man, RoboCop and Dr Who to life, the London-based company was chosen to work on Gravity because of its prior involvement on Cuaron's previous movie Children Of Men.

But as TechRadar found out when it recently spoke to Alexis Wajsbrot, CG effects supervisor on Gravity, even though they had worked with Cuaron in the past, nothing quite prepared them for what they had to achieve next.

Creating the unknown

"Gravity was different from any other project because we started very early on when there was just a script," said Wajsbrot.

"Alfonzo went to Framestore and spoke to Tim Webber who was the effects chief on Children Of Men and asked: 'how do we do the effects?'"

The answer was... well, for a long time there wasn't one. The effects Cuaron wanted to achieve had never been done before, so everything had to be built from the ground up. One of the reasons for this was Cuaron's insistence on long takes - something him and his director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (affectionally known as Chivo) were famed for.

"Zero gravity has already been done in Apollo 13, where they used what is called the 'vomit comet' - a plane that reaches zero gravity for one minute. Tim and Alfonzo did try this but you can only do one-minute takes and only from a certain angle so it wasn't going to work for Gravity," explained Wajsbrot.

"We had to investigate other ideas, like using cables and different techniques. What we found out was that all of the traditional techniques that had been used in the previous movies wouldn't work for Gravity because of Alfonso's directing style. That's when we knew we had to find another workflow."