ASTRO Project Journal

Artists are often asked to produce images of things never seen before, and to make them look real when no one is quite sure how they would actually appear. In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, VFX supervisor Paul Franklin and the team at Double Negative were asked to produce images of things that aren’t even in our dimension, and furthermore have them accurate to not only quantum physics and relativistic laws but also our best understanding (or guess) of quantum gravity.

In this project, I have to create a series of at least 10 images of astral phenomena using optics, light, focus, exposure to create your shots of what appears to be ‘astral phenomena’. At first, it seemed really easy and I was thinking that there has to be something tricky about it. But then the rules came . These images have to be created only using the “Blend mode” in Photoshop and nothing else.

At this point I started to think how to reproduce these “space” images with simple things like salt, flour, veggies ..and ,believe me, as we went further with the shootings the ideas became more and more creative .

For shooting the images we later blended to create the final “astral phenomena” we used controlled light studios , DSLR cameras , different lights , and the objects. All of this taught us how the light was working and how you can physically play with it to create different images that fool the eye into thinking it s something else than it actually is.

One of the first things we shot were stars. It makes a lot of sense because when you first think of space , the first thing coming in our mind are stars..and then the moon. They are the only things from space we can actually see with our eyes alone. This one was easy, salt on a black background , for example, would pretty much do the job. But what about planets? A cosmic storm? A meteorite or a black hole?

This is a celery used to reproduce a planet . I put it on a black background, poured some salt and added a red light from above and a green one from bellow to create the illusion of outer space “colors”

We also thought of glowing sticks for an interesting neon effect we could use…and we did!

Breaking the glowing stick allows you to spread the liquid inside. I do not reccomend to try this because the inside contains also thin glass ..and you may be allergic to the liquid. Who knows?

This challenge raised a lot of questions in my mind and I was really happy to realise the fact that it does push your imagination to think of unconventional methods to do solve a quest . All of us started answering these questions experimenting with every object would cross our mind and had available or could’ve been found. And if I learned something while doing this was that it doesn’t really matter what materials you use to create something , as long as the result is what you want, you can get as creative as you can be ! There are no limits! ( well in our case we have the rules, but this made us do something “oldschool ” to understand the principles of what we’re doing today in our comfy digital worlds with maybe only few clicks)