Inception – Production Focus

If you thought Inception was a great movie (which I do) have a look at the production focus on CGSociety.

“Double Negative (DNeg) was the sole FX vender on Inception, with some miniature work from New Deal Studios. Dneg delivered some 500 FX shots for the film with a team of up to 275 people through various phases of production. Shot on film, often with a hand held camera, the medium was the least of Franklin’s worries. Fortunately, DNeg is the veteran of numerous hand-held shows starting with Enemy at the Gates way back in 2001.

“For that show we pushed our tracking as hard as we could,” said Franklin “establishing a standard that became the basis for our work over the following decade. Perhaps the most extreme examples of hand-held technique would beThe Bourne Ultimatum and Green Zone, both directed by Paul Greengrass. The camera movement in Inception was fairly mild by comparison!”

Double Negative built a comprehensive film color pipeline to handle the work on Batman Begins. That was used again on The Dark Knight and then on Inception, “with a few tweaks that we’ve added over the years.” Dneg is an established FX house with years of history, and when the company was first launched, all movies were shot on film and then graded in the lab as opposed to a DI suite.

“In essence,” explains Franklin “it’s not really that different to working with a DI – the difference is that you are setting your own grading numbers based on the film clips supplied by the production as opposed to a grading suite being run offsite. It must be said that Chris’s films are the only large-scale productions that we work on that don’t use the DI process.” Note: ‘DI’ is Digital Intermediate, the more complex digital version of the telecine and color grading process…

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