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Inception (2010)
Inception is a 2010 science fiction action film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with Emma Thomas, his wife. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets. He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment for the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious. The…
Directed by Christopher Nolan · Shot by Wally Pfister · Cut by Lee Smith · Music by Hans Zimmer · Ratio 2.39:1 · 148 min
How it was made
- Slow-motion sequences were shot on a Photo-Sonics 35mm camera at up to 1,000 frames per second; when Wally Pfister tested an equivalent high-speed digital camera instead, five of six takes were unusable due to glitches, against a clean take rate on every Photo-Sonics roll.
- Visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin built physical miniatures of the mountain-fortress set and blew them up on camera rather than simulating the destruction digitally, in keeping with Nolan's preference for in-camera effects over CGI.
- For the Limbo city sequence, Franklin's team built a computer model of a glacier, then wrote a program that algorithmically added roads, intersections and ravines until the ice took on the look of a complex, organic cityscape.
- The film carried roughly 500 visual effects shots, notably fewer than the 620 in Nolan's earlier Batman Begins and far below the 2,000-plus common in effects-heavy contemporaries.
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Behind the scenes
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