Behind The Effects: Inception Anti-Gravity Tricks

 

Welcome to Behind the Effects, the once stop shop for all your behind the scenes needs.  Today’s article will be about everyone’s favorite mind-blowing science fiction flick, Inception!

Many people praised Inception upon its release for it’s fast paced, mind bending plot; but I for one was never blown away by what was going on during the story (I’ve seen characters going through peoples dreams on Cartoon Network many-a-time.)  The special effects however, blew my mind.  How the heck did they pull off scenes like the one seen below?  (The best part starts about a minute and a half in to the video.)

This instantly memorable sequence is so amazing that it’s actually kind of hard to describe it in words.  How did they accomplish the astounding effect?  The answer looks something like this. . . 

 

And here's another picture of the thing next to a human being so you can get a feel for the size of it.

Those pictures you just looked at are of a giant series of rings that can be rotated or locked into place at will. built specifically for Inception, this ginormous build had to be very carefully designed;  every ring in the structure had to be perfectly round in order for anything to function correctly.  Later in production a replica of the Inception dream hotel-hallway was placed dead in the center, as seen in a third picture below.  The actors were placed inside here while the contraption was set to rotate, creating the illusion that gravity was playing all sorts of crazy tricks on them.

Many shots used a standard camera crew or a crane, but for the gravity shifting action sequence the camera was bolted to the floor of the Hallway, making it so that, as far as the audience was concerned, the ceiling was always up and the floor was always down.  Obviously this was not the case; they spun the heck out of that thing while the two actors inside had to pretend they were fighting.  It took many takes in order to get everything right;  It turns out its pretty difficult to perform a choreographed fight sequence when the floor is literally spinning out from under you.

Later in the movie, as you may remember, the hotel goes into full on zero gravity mode (due to a van falling off a bridge.)  The effects required for these more outer-space style sequences were significantly different from their wall climbing counterparts.  

For instance: In order to make it appear as if actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt was floating through space they made a second replica of the hotel hallway, but this time it was straight up and down, vertical and way up in the air.

The actors didn’t float so much as they had to slowly descend straight down the vertical hallway on wires, miming their limbs in such away that they appeared weightless.  making it look like they were floating instead of falling was grueling work for the actors, the physical toll was exceptional.

Most of the other zero-g shots were achieved through intense wire work, most of which was extensively more complex then the wire work done in other movies of this sort, but  also just like every other movie; the wires were edited out digitally in post production.  Check out the picture below to get an idea of how crazy this stuff was.

That concludes a quick, but proficient, overview of the anti-gravity special effects used in Inception.  As mind-blowing as the labyrinthine plot for the Christopher Nolan epic is, I think that the ingenious engineering that it took to make it happen is even more so!  The combination of the tricks listed here create one of the coolest looking special effect sequences in modern cinema.  Take that CGI!

Thanks for reading!  if you want to meet up for some dream sharing you can always email me at www.atchleyosaurus@gmail.com, and to follow my blog to get more cool movie facts and reviews follow Atchley-O-Saurus on Twitter or like us on Facebook.  Check back this weekend for reviews of movies both newer and older!