UCLA's Contribution to the Academy Awards

Today is the day for the Academy Awards ceremony. A UCLA alumnus describes his contribution to the film "Don't Look Up" in an interview with the Bruin excerpted below.

If you saw the movie but are one of those folks who walk out of the theater or turn off your TV (or whatever device) when the closing credits roll, you would have missed the scene where 22,000+ years from now, the survivors emerge from hibernation on a new planet and Merryl Streep is eaten by a local creature.

Other-worldly visual effects take center stage in “Don’t Look Up.” Nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” follows the story of astronomy graduate student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) as they make the disturbing revelation that a planet-killer comet is headed toward Earth. Alumnus Eric Guaglione served as animation visual effects supervisor for the film and used visual effects to enhance numerous celestial scenes depicting space. The Daily Bruin’s Paria Honardoust spoke with Guaglione about the role of visual effects in “Don’t Look Up” as well as the facilitation of its technical aspects...

DB: For those who are unfamiliar with visual effects, could you briefly break down the visual effects processes of this film?

EG: I could use the very end sequence of the actors descending from the spacecraft and onto this planet (as an example). In there, some of the spacecraft was actually a prop that was built, but not the whole spacecraft. It’s pretty much the ladder where they’re walking down onto the planet surface, and so there was a very small area on stage that they could walk around on, but everything in the background was done as a blue screen. That way, we can later replace that blue area that was on screen with the environment of entire alien planets.

In the meantime, we wanted to create a place that felt like it was alive, so we have designs of alien birds flying and, of course, we had to animate those. The other teams put the details onto the characters like feathers, colors and the appropriate lighting. But it looks like a realistic image after it’s been activated. Then, of course, the more tricky things to do are when you would have, let’s say, this alien bird-like creature that attacks Meryl Streep’s character. There you would have something that’s pretty challenging because you have a human that is shot on set, and then all of a sudden, you have an alien that attacks that human. Well, you can’t really kill an actor on set – so you have to do that through digital means.

Full article at https://dailybruin.com/2022/03/22/oscars-2022-qa-alumnus-discusses-process-behind-visual-effects-in-dont-look-up.

If you are one of those folks who didn't wait for all the closing credits, fear not! The scene is at the link below: [Click on the arrow until it runs.]

Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARQjA_CMRj0.