Tall lightboxes stood upright in the center of the studio, with countless people busying around them. Once Duke gave the order to begin, the set quickly fell silent, leaving only the humming of the lightboxes and the friction sound of the mechanical arm-mounted camera sliding down.
Suspended by twelve tension cables in the cradle mounted to the lightbox, Scarlett Johansson didn't feel well. It was stuffy and hot inside the lightbox, and she felt very isolated. The shooting sessions were usually long, making the whole process incredibly tough. If she hadn't started practicing yoga and working out last year, she definitely wouldn't have been able to endure it.
Despite the discomfort, Scarlett still gave it her all in performance. She knew Duke had placed high hopes on her and didn't want to let him down.
Since the shoot began, she had only complained to Duke once during lunch that was her only complaint.
The cradle rotated, and Scarlett felt slightly dizzy. Directly above her, the camera mounted on the mechanical arm spun and descended rapidly. That heavy IMAX camera was moving incredibly fast, as if it were about to smash into her face.
Scarlett didn't move at all…
"Cut!"
The shout to stop rang out. Duke stood up from behind the monitor and shouted loudly into the lightbox, "Watch your eyes! You blinked!"
It was a natural human reflex. When portraying the effect of the camera "crashing" toward the actor, the actor themselves barely moved. Instead, the camera, under precise control of the mechanical arm, would "crash" toward them. In this scene, the camera had to shoot toward Scarlett Johansson at 40 miles per hour and stop three inches from her face. During this process, Scarlett had to remain completely still.
An excellent actor can control every facial expression and instinctive reaction. After Duke's reminder, Scarlett completed the next take successfully.
Afterward, Duke gave the crew a break to prepare for the extended long take from the first half of the film.
Back when Gravity opened with an 18-minute space sequence, it stunned everyone. Even the most critical and nitpicky cinephiles bowed to the shot's complex camera movement, imaginative staging, and seamless CG integration.
But this crew wasn't planning a single shot that long they split it into two long takes spliced together. The first shot would last about twelve and a half minutes, followed by the next one, forming a complete long take.
If creating zero gravity wasn't hard enough, these long takes were the real challenge long takes in zero gravity.
Zero gravity was what made these shots tricky. It wasn't just hard to simulate it was exponentially harder to combine with long takes. Not additive, but multiplicative the difficulty spiked sharply.
Duke and John Schwartzman had conducted a lot of discussions and tests for this.
During the actual shoot, the camera's motion would be recorded by motion capture systems to match it with the CG environments. Duke wanted the camera's movement to be as smooth and natural as possible. So instead of keyframing it frame-by-frame, he opted to use a virtual camera system in a small motion capture stage. John Schwartzman and his four camera assistants could carry the small rig around, controlling camera settings and framing. Then they'd tweak the recorded path to make it feel like it had been filmed in zero gravity.
Unlike before, Duke believed long takes could deeply immerse the audience in the film. The key to a long take was immersion. For a film like this, it could make everything more realistic, fitting, and direct.
The fewer the editing cuts, the more interaction there is between the audience and the characters like the audience is watching the character's experiences in real time.
A few days ago, Duke considered trying out more dynamic camera movements, but John Schwartzman and participant Mike Dawson advised him against it.
According to Duke's original plan, the opening shot would end with the female lead drifting into the vastness of space. As she floated farther away, there would be no need for a cut; the camera could follow her in a single continuous take. This way, the two initial shots could merge into one.
But John Schwartzman and Mike Dawson both disagreed. They believed the best edit point was exactly when the heroine floated away. If this were a book, that moment would be the last sentence of the chapter.
Extending the shot would increase filming difficulty exponentially. They quickly persuaded Duke with one reason there simply wasn't enough time!
Yes, time was the issue. The production schedule was already extremely tight, and Duke had no time to waste.
And he wasn't the type to be obsessive. Whether it's long takes or editing, it had to suit the actual needs of the film. The story itself, along with cinematography, sound, performance, and color, were all equal tools of filmmaking. So the director served the film, not just the story.
Another difficulty was making the long take visually compelling.
The point of shooting a film wasn't to have the audience sit there dead silent wasn't to make them sit and wait for someone to float into frame for a close-up.
A long take was like a ballet. Every single second had to be engaging.
A director tells a story through the camera from beginning to end. From wide environmental shots to dialogue scenes, solo shots, action scenes, and back to wide shots it's all about visual storytelling. If everything had to be told in one single shot, then they had to find a way to include all those types within that single take.
During the exhausting and intensive preparations, the visual pre-visualization earned Duke's approval. Lighting simulations were also finalized. The entire VFX team would do another technical pre-vis to help Duke decide how to shoot each scene and translate the visuals from the preview onto mechanical setups and lightboxes.
Once George Clooney and Scarlett Johansson were ready, the crew began shooting. Besides John Schwartzman and his four camera assistants filming, the effects team used the IRIS robotic arm to control all camera movements. Every timing and camera angle was precisely calculated and arranged something never before achieved in previous programmed shots.
Within a continuous long take, showcasing wide shots, close-ups, and action scenes back-to-back required a solution to incorporate all those varied elements in a single shot. That was the hardest part and combining zero gravity with long takes made it all the more extraordinarily difficult.
The entire filming process was rough, repeatedly halted by Duke. Any small mistake during shooting would render everyone's efforts useless. And due to the shot's length and the complexity of the visual effects, everyone from the actors to the tech team kept making errors.
Sensory-wise, the shot needed to be flawless. Every detail had to be accounted for.
Duke, who was obsessive about details, had even referenced the IMAX documentary Hubble during pre-production. He worked closely with NASA astronaut and film consultant Cady Coleman to study the Hubble Space Telescope's flight path, crafting the relative positions of the Sun and Moon based on the timeline set in the movie, and creating a model of the Earth.
At Hubble's location during that time, what did Earth look like? Where was the Sun, and at what angle? Duke considered it all.
Aside from Duke, the people who spent the most time and energy during the shoot were his director of photography and visual effects supervisor.
For many scenes within the long take, the VFX team had to complete visual previews in advance. Otherwise, they wouldn't know where the light should come from or what kind of effects should be used at which moments. Tim Webber's team spent a lot of time simulating lighting. The boundaries between VFX and cinematography began to blur.
The two had overlapping responsibilities, without clear-cut divisions.
As a cinematographer, John Schwartzman had to deal with more visual effects issues than any other DOP. Meanwhile, for VFX artist Tim Webber, he had to deal with more cinematography problems than any other VFX supervisor.
Because in the making of such a film, the two roles did not need to be strictly separated.
The two long takes took nearly ten days to film. From director Duke to John Schwartzman and Tim Webber, and then to actors Scarlett Johansson and George Clooney, everyone was utterly exhausted.
When these two nearly eighteen-minute-long shots were finally completed, it felt like a graduation ceremony for the film's creators.
Duke admitted that all the other scenes in the film combined weren't as difficult as these two shots.
These nearly eighteen-minute-long shots embodied the crew's full efforts and technological breakthroughs in preparation and execution robotic arm camera movements, new lighting methods, new CG space rendering techniques, enabling unrestricted camera movement, dynamic character lighting, and magnificent, composed cosmic scenery.
In Tim Webber's words, once those two long takes were done, it marked the end of weightlessness and space being challenges in filmmaking.
During the production, Duke and his technical team solved many of the problems involved in shooting weightless scenes. With technical assistance, they completely reinvented the Hollywood approach to space exploration films, which used to rely on "wires + green screen + CG post-production."
It's no exaggeration to say that after this, the only thing that might surpass it would be to actually go shoot in space.
With the completion of the two long takes, Duke finally breathed a sigh of relief and gave the crew two days off. However, when filming resumed, a special visitor came to his studio.