AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Interstellar blackhole1/13/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() His main task was to work on rigid-body simulations – not a trivial task given the many fight scenes. Suddenly these rag-dolls came to life and you’d find yourself wincing in sympathy as they were battered about Oliver JamesĪ defining moment came in 2001, when one of his ex-colleagues invited him to join Warner Bros’ ESC Entertainment at Alameda California to work on The Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions. Missing the intellectual challenge offered by physics, in 1995 he contacted and secured a role in the R&D team of the Computer Film Company – a niche studio specialising in digital film which was part of the emerging London visual effects industry. This, in addition to his two other passions – computing and photography – led him to his first job in a small photographic studio in London where he became familiar with the technical and operational aspects of the industry. I had to study a lot to understand the physics of black holes and curved space time.”Ī great part of visual effects is understanding how light interacts with surfaces and volumes and eventually enters a camera’s lens and as a student, Oliver was interested in atomic physics, quantum mechanics and modern optics. I feel it was the same kind of gap I faced while working for Interstellar. “It confronted me with the gap between what you observe and reality. For James, it all began with an undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Oxford in the late 1980s – a period that he describes as one of the most fascinating and intellectually stimulating of his life. DNEG’s work, carried out in collaboration with theoretical cosmologist Kip Thorne, led to some of the most physically-accurate images of a spinning black hole ever created, earning the firm an Academy Award and a BAFTA. Oliver James is chief scientist of the world’s biggest visual effects studio, DNEG, which produced the spectacular visual effects for Interstellar. Gargantua A variant of the black-hole accretion disk seen in the film Interstellar. Physics inspired by the film Interstellar was detailed in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.Oliver James of DNEG, which produced the striking black hole in the film Interstellar, describes the science behind visual effects and the challenges in this fast-growing industry. The new paper examines the computer algorithms designed to create the black hole in the film, as well as some of the discoveries astronomers are making from the code. Thorne realized that a person at the edge of a black hole would see upwards of a dozen images of background stars, due to caustics - regions of space warped by the massive gravitation of the body. Gravitational lensing, in which the image of a star or galaxy is seen "behind" the edge of a black hole, was found to create spectacular effects, which were used in the film, and new research. Computers were used to simulate the actions of light passing near such a massive body, and the results of that process helped astronomers examine what would actually happen in real life, under those conditions. Also, the Doppler shift in light would cause half of a rotating disk to appear blue to an observer, and that effect was also taken out of the final film.īundles of light rays were displayed in images, rather than individual paths, in order to make the film more enjoyable for moviegoers. In the movie, the accretion disk surrounding Gargantua is shown larger and more red than it would be in real life. However, that was thought to be confusing to audiences, so the effect was negated in the film. In early filming, the black hole was shown slightly squashed, due to the effects of rotation. ![]() ![]() Gargantua, the massive black hole at the center of the story, is shown as a massive accretion disk, where matter spirals into the object, emitting radiation as it comes inward. "I'd ask him a question and maybe a week later, sometimes a month, I'd get a beautifully presented paper that he'd laid out with references going into the history of the problems I'd been asking about," Oliver James, chief scientist of Double Negative, said. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |