For Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Paul Lambert Lambert, of all the huge challenges presented by Ryan Gosling space epic “Project Hail Mary,” the most daunting was creating convincing zero gravity.
“Zero-G was probably my personal biggest concern going into the movie,” he said at View Conference in Turin, Italy, drilling down on its VFX.
“We tried very hard to convince the production to use the vomit comet,” he added, referring to aircraft maneuvers that briefly generate weightlessness. But the spacecraft sets were too elaborate to recreate onboard, so Gosling performed on wire rigs, including a rotating harness.
Removing the wires was only the beginning. When a suspended body still appeared to be hanging rather than floating, VFX artists adjusted the position of Gosling’s legs, arms or torso and added drifting objects to reinforce the illusion. Lambert said the actor was committed to performing his own stunt work, including demanding spacewalk material.
Other experiments were deliberately hands-on. Fraser used an infrared-modified camera, programmable IR lights and water running in front of the lens to develop some of the film’s stranger imagery. “It was literally a mad science lab,” Lambert recalled. Burning fireballs, liquids, lasers and ferrofluid were also filmed to provide starting points for the microscopic effects.
The DP returned during postproduction to work with ILM’s Helios virtual-camera system on the sequence near Adrian. Artists tracked Gosling’s on-set performance and recreated it within digital environments, allowing Fraser to choose new camera positions without discarding the original acting.
Across those techniques, the supervisors’ ambition remained consistent: to make even the most elaborate effects obey a recognizable physical logic while ensuring Rocky felt as present beside Gosling as any human scene partner.
The visual effects team behind “Project Hail Mary” started its journey through space, however, by making an unexpected discovery: much of the sky would look surprisingly familiar. Rather than fill Ryan Gosling’s interstellar adventure with colorful nebulae, Lambert and co-supervisor Mag Sarnowska used astronomical data, practical puppetry and carefully controlled cinematography to keep its science-fiction imagery grounded in reality.
“We had visions of all these beautiful nebulae, but in the end, the skies were pretty much as we see them today, from Earth,” Lambert told View Conference in Turin on Friday, describing research conducted for directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel.
The team drew on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to map the stars between Earth and Tau Ceti, some 11.9 light-years away, while studying NASA footage and raw images from the International Space Station to establish how cameras behave in orbit. Exposure became a guiding principle. “If you were to take a movie camera up to space and try to shoot something, you wouldn’t see the stars,” Lambert explained.
Near the brightly illuminated planet Adrian, background stars were therefore largely absent. Farther from Tau Ceti, where the light was weaker, a hypothetical high-sensitivity camera could reveal them. “Rather than simply choosing when to show stars with dramatic effects, we wanted their visibility to follow the actual lighting and exposure conditions,” Lambert said.
DP Greig Fraser extended that philosophy into the film’s texture. Digitally captured footage was printed onto Kodak film and scanned back: 5254, with silver retention, for a relatively smooth, subdued Earth, and grainier 5203 for space. Two months of virtual-production exploration before filming also allowed Fraser and the directors to test lighting, camera movements and the scale of spacecraft interiors.
Rather than dictate final shots, those sessions let the filmmakers experiment with digital environments and camera positions early, with the resulting camera data helping guide the physical shoot and subsequent VFX work.
Rocky, the alien companion performed by James Ortiz and a team of puppeteers, posed a different problem: making a physically present character indistinguishable from his digital counterpart. Sarnowska described three practical versions, including an animatronic and a smaller reference puppet. Framestore scanned the physical creation and studied hours of performance footage, reproducing the puppeteers’ movement when the cramped spaceship sets made practical operation impossible.
“Our full CG Rocky got really good at mimicking the puppeteers,” Sarnowska said. “In the end, half of the Rocky shots were puppet and the other half CG.” She added that the team sometimes struggled to distinguish the versions during internal reviews. The effects crew also rebuilt Rocky’s transparent xenonite barriers digitally to remove reflections, hide operators and maintain the complicated play of light through the set.
For Rocky’s sonar-based point of view, the filmmakers also experimented with printing the images onto different film formats, ultimately using 10mm and 16mm for selected shots to give them a more organic texture, to bring a larger credibility to a moving tale of interstellar friendship which proved one of this year’s box office hits.
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