Gravity And Its CG Template

While we have still not seen any footage or photos yet from Alfonso Cuaron's new sci-fi thriller "Gravity"--new details about the film have came courtesy of a recent digital design conference reports Immersed in Movies (via First Showing).

The film follows two astronauts left alive after an exploding satellite kills the other crew aboard their space station, setting off a desperate race home for the latter to get to her child

The picture will feature extended long shots. Just how long though will surprise you when you consider an average two hour film  has around 1,300-1,500 shots.

Chris deFaria, who oversees animation effects at Warner Bros, recalls his conversation with Cuaron about it - "I said, 'How long?' And he said he wanted the first shot to be really long. And I said, 'You mean, 40 seconds?' 'No, 17 minutes.' So it ends up the film only has 156 shots in the entire two-hour movie, many of them six, eight, ten minutes long."

Because the film uses so much computer animation, the production team tried to see their task in a different way- instead of making a live-action film with a massive amount of CG animation, they saw it as a CG animated film with some live-action elements in it.

deFaria says "Instead of trying to create real people and what they're doing, let's turn it around and create almost an entirely animated film and then backwards engineer the people into that film. As a matter of fact, let's not even engineer the people into the film, let's engineer their faces. So you've got these little faces inside these little helmets."

He added - "When we began to bring in both the production designer and the DP we realized that we were committing to many things, not just shot design but lighting, direction, every prop, every single doorway, every single distance so that when we shot somebody’s eyes, they were converging at the right distance point. And we had a myriad of tools to deal with that. But we didn’t create the virtual world and let the live action drive what was ultimately going to be the shot. We actually created the shot and then made the live action work within it.”

Sandra Bullock and George Clooney star in the film

Cuaron also co-wrote the script with his son Jonás

An early cut has already been screened by the studio, as post-production continues with a November 21st 2012 release eyed.