One of the more interesting stories in the lead-up to the release of Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” was a quote from Nolan himself who said the movie “contains ‘zero’ CG shots”.
Nolan has become famous in recent years for doing everything he can practically wherever possible and minimising the use of CG. That includes the film’s showcasing of the first-ever test explosion of the nuclear bomb in New Mexico in 1945 – a sequence done entirely without CG effects.
Does that mean there are no visual effects? Hardly. In an interview this week with THR, the film’s Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson wants to clear up some of the talk about the film’s visual effects work which are, admittedly, mostly ‘invisible’.
He says a lot of it comes down to confusion over Nolan stating there are no computer-generated images in the film, with people interpreting that to mean there are no visual effects:
“Some people have picked that up and taken it to mean that there are no visual effects, which is clearly not true. Visual effects can encompass a whole lot of things.”
Case in point is the Trinity Test itself which was done by layering filmed elements together with digital compositing, meaning the shot was assembled by computer even though it was made of real-world elements:
“[Nolan] didn’t want use any CG simulations of a nuclear explosion. He wanted to be in that sort of language of the era of the film … using practical filmed elements to tell that story.”
The result was a large explosion, compiled from a library of roughly 400 individual elements, that doesn’t actually look like a nuclear explosion with its signature mushroom cloud.
Jackson admits the result wasn’t what the actual explosion would have looked like, calling it:
“A sort of loose artistic interpretation of the ideas rather than an accurate representation of the physics”.
He adds that in all, the film contains roughly 200 visual effects shots, including practical effects shots, with a lot of it being digital removal of modern-day elements from filming locations.
“Oppenheimer” is still in cinemas now.
