“Defying Gravity” follows the lives of a small group of astronauts onboard an international spaceship in the year 2052, and obviously contains hundreds of special effects shots due to the environment. Several of those shots were done by Stargate Studios, and fxguide sits down with visual effects supervisor Sam Nicholson about some of the more impressive effects.
All the ships – the landers – were computer generated. So a lot of these shots included visual effects photography rather than having everything computer generated. Then matte paintings were done in Photoshop, 3D ships were done in Maya with everything blended together in After Effects. We like to try and put as many different techniques into a shot as we can so that it doesn’t look too sterile. If you computer-generate clouds they can be too predictable. But if you use a liquid nitrogen tank you have no idea what that thing is going to do!
via fxguide – visual effects news – Grey’s Anatomy in Space: Defying Gravity.
