Europe’s largest and one of the most acclaimed VFX houses globally, Double Negative, part of India listed Prime Focus, the world’s largest independent and integrated media services powerhouse, has bagged the Academy Award for visual effects for their spectacular work on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. The award was presented to VFX Supervisors Paul Franklin (one of the founding members of Double Negative) and Andrew Lockley, SFX Supervisor Ian Hunter and New Deal Studios’ VFX Supervisor Scott Fisher at the 87th Annual Academy Awards held on 22 February at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles.
This is the second Oscar for Double Negative and Paul Franklin, having previously won for Nolan’s Inception. Interstellar beat other nominees that included Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy and X-Men: Days of Future Past. A week ago Double Negative had also won the BAFTA for Special Visual Effects for the same film.
Reacting to the news, Prime Focus, founder and executive chairman & global CEO Namit Malhotra said: “This is an incredibly proud moment for all of us at Prime Focus and Double Negative. I want to congratulate, Alex (Hope), Matt (Holben), Paul (Franklin) and the entire team of Double Negative for bringing home this exceptional honor. I have always been a great admirer of Nolan’s films and hence it is really heartening for me to see our work on Interstellar being recognised as the world’s best. On this joyous occasion I want to reaffirm our commitment to help Double Negative continue on its path of creative excellence that is second to none.”
Double Negative provided all the visual effects for the space odyssey, with New Deal Studios providing miniatures and Scott Fisher heading up SFX. The Dneg team was tasked with the challenge of accurately depicting the film’s wormhole, its supermassive black hole (Gargantua), the Tesseract (a four dimensional space allowing time to be seen as a physical dimension), digital space vistas for projection on-set (no greenscreen was used in any of the space sequences), CG versions of the robots and the population of alien worlds with giant waves and landscapes of frozen cloud and ice.
Double Negative has a spectacular line up in 2015. Under production projects include Terminator: Genisys, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, Mission Impossible 5, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, Ant-Man, Insurgent and Grimsby. Projects just delivered include Jupiter Ascending, In The Heart of the Sea and Ex Machina.
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