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Visual effects supervisors Bjorn Mayer and Eric Barba worked with their respected teams to bring Kosinski’s vision to the screen. Mayer’s team at Pixomondo worked on the cloud work since many sequences had the main character flying around the planet. Mayer said their biggest challenge was generating ice on the bubble ship. Barba’s team at Digital Domain found the end sequence inside the massive space station the most difficult test. “It was a challenge to make it work on screen,” said Barba. The 804 VFX shots for the movie were almost evenly split between the two FX companies. Filmed on location in Iceland, Hawaii and Louisiana, 85% of Oblivion was shot live and 15% being all-CG shots. Going on location scouting for the movie was very helpful to Mayer and Barba because they could take pictures and draw concepts, which makes a huge difference later on, said Mayer. “You need to be there,” added Barba. It was an unusual but very rewarding experience for Simon. “It’s a boy’s dream (to work Oblivion),” he said. “We all as kids drew something and here’s a big film studio behind it with one of the most famous actors and a very sophisticated director and they all pull on one string and make it happen.” Seeing his drawings and his design modifications become real is already one of the biggest highlight of his career. “I would call it a dream job,” he said. Simon designs his own vehicles and is currently working on a book incorporating his designs with a story. VISUAL WORK Digital Domain was responsible for Tom Cruise fighting himself. Working with Kosinski, director of photography Claudio Miranda, the stunt team and Cruise, Barba and his team helped choreograph the shots when the actor is fighting a clone of himself. When some of the shots didn’t match, Digital Domain replaced Cruise’s face with a fully CG version by capturing a 3D scan of the actor’s head on a light stage. Costume designer Marlene Stewart used light colors for Harper and darker tones for the Scavs and then added complexity. Kosinski wanted Harper to be in white, the traditional hero color. Stewart ended up creating a grey version to make it look more lived in. The costume also had to be practical given the time Cruise would spend in it.
Concept to the Screen - The Digital Bits Oblivion: From Concept to the Screen - The Digital Bits
Oblivion features many visual highlights, including shots of the torch of the Statue of Liberty and the top of the Empire State building in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Perhaps the biggest challenge was the seemingly floating station where Harper and his friend Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) reside high up in the clouds above the Earth’s surface.
Darker colors and a complex helmet comprised of four separate sections were utilized for the Scavs. It took 30 minutes for the actors to put on the Scavs’ costumes. “They’re quite a gear to put on,” said Thieman. DESIGNING THE BUBBLE SHIP
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He was the one primarily using all of this and it had to be comfortable for him, said Deidre Thieman, manager of production archives at NBC Universal. “He’s wearing it through the whole film through all different climates. He’s got cold weather and he’s got really hot weather so it had to be comfortable for him,” she explained. Kosinski designed the insect-looking helicopter type of spaceship known as the bubble ship. Designer Daniel Simon was brought on board to refine the concept and make it practical for the movie to be shot. Simon was a car designer who worked at Bugatti Automobiles and Volkswagen and a concept designer, as seen in his first book, Cosmic Motors, which features photorealistic fantasy vehicles. He worked with Kosinski as a vehicle concept designer on Tron Legacy and on Captain America: The First Avenger and Prometheus. Another satisfying experience for Kosinski was getting M83 to do the score for Oblivion. “The score only version of the film to me is really interesting,” he said. Kosinski had composer Joseph Trapanese work with M83’s front man Anthony Gonzalez for the score, just as he did bringing Trapanese to work with Daft Punk on Tron Legacy. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” he said. “I wanted to do on Tron. We weren’t able to do it then, but on this one, I got my way. The score only version of the movie is a really interesting way to experience it,” he said. COSTUMES OF OBLIVION It was during a trip in the Middle East that Kosinski was inspired to create the story of a man in search of his identity. “I’ve been to Petra and Jordan a few years earlier and it was a really inspiring kind of trip to go on and I thought if you could see our world in the same state that Petra exist today, what would that be like?” he recalled.Growing up a fan of the classic television series Twilight Zone and films such as Planet of the Apes (1968) and Alien (1979), Kosinski earned an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University and then graduated with a Master’s degree in Architecture from Columbia University. He lent his visual style to several commercials while working on the story of Oblivion. Simon wasn’t too fond of the seatbelts “because I would think in the future you’d have something better than that.” But the seatbelts had to be practical and there’s not much you can do design-wise, he said. TOM CRUISE’S CUSTOM MADE SEAT What began as a small film developed into a much bigger product when Kosinski expanded the universe of Oblivion. He didn’t anticipate the story becoming so big. “It was always a small character driven story and it always had this small cast of three or four characters but I knew the ideas were big and I wanted the landscape and the world that surround these characters to be large,” he said.
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