Amazing Before & After Hollywood VFX Breakdown - Ad Astra
915Ad astra is a science fiction adventure film that not only boasts big name movie stars but also big name VFX houses. MPC, Method Studios, Mr X, Weta Digital, Industrial Light and Magic to mention just a few, all collaborated together to make this journey through space seem more science, than fiction.
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Mr.X.
Among other shots, Mr X was responsible for creating the films big opening scene where Brad Pit (McBride) is working in low earth orbit on a 80,000ft antenna and a mysterious surge knocks him off.
For this shot a small section of the antenna was made as a full size set piece so Brad could interact with it, the team took reference from the international space station for the materials used, paying special attention to the way these materials would "weather" up there whilst still giving them a "made in the future" feel to them.
MPC
Lead VFX house MPC provided nearly 200 shots, including the asset "Cepheus" which was Major McBride's main ship. MPC created The launch base and Earth take-off shots, the moon landing and Moon city sequences as well as Moon take-off, Mars landing and Mars Take-off scenes. For all these Take-off and landing scenes MPC watch masses of NASA footage, concentrating on creating realistic dust clouds and smoke plumes to make their simulations as close to reference as possible.
One of the biggest challenges was lighting. When on Earth, in a room, you have ambient sunlight, artificial light and reflected light, in space, you basically have one big, direct, light source with no air to dissipate it and not many objects to reflect it. The team had to refer again to NASA archives to be able to realistically illuminate the scenes and also create this distinctive "ringing effect" that happens around bright spots.
Method Studios.
Method studios created a very intense and extremely complicated lunar rover chase scene. Knowing they'd have to extended backgrounds anyway, the team decided to created an entire CG Lunar landscape for the chase scene.
They made some real life "Lunar rovers" and shot some live action footage in the southwestern US deserts, they also shot some footage on a soundstage with a black screen they then rotoscoped this rover footage and added it to CG lunar landscape.
As mentioned before, light in space is different to light on earth in order to overcome this problem the team shot the desert footage with two different cameras, one was an ARRIFLEX motion picture film camera and the other was an ARRI ALEXA XT with a modified sensor to capture infrared light, by combining both, they were able to take luminescence from the infrared camera and the color from the ARRIFLEX to reproduced the lunar lighting effect.
Added to all this complexity was that the spacesuits visors were basically 360 degree mirrors that show the world around them, so therefore, that world had to be created in CG and added to the visor. as if not complicated enough in some shots you also had to see the actors face at the same time.
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