As we predicted above before it was actually announced (we know, we’re as impressive as Neil Patrick Harris), Patricia Arquette scooped up the Best Supporting Actress award, and she wasn’t afraid to use her win as a platform to speak up for women everywhere, as well as people everywhere, and that focused, progressive attitude extended to the backstage press room.
“It is time for women,” said Arquette. “Equal means equal. And the truth is, the older women get, the less money they make. And it’s inexcusable that we go around the world and we talk about equal rights for women in other countries and we don’t ‑‑ one of those Superior Court justices said two years ago in a‑‑ in a law speech at a university, we don’t have equal rights for women in America and we don’t because when they wrote the Constitution, they didn’t intend it for women. So, the truth is, even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are applied that really do affect women.”
One of the smaller, yet still important, bouts of the night came with the announcement of the Best Animated Feature award. While some hoped for a How to Train Your Dragon 2 win or even a surprise The LEGO Movie write-in campaign (we’re never letting it go), Big Hero 6 nabbed the top prize.
Backstage, creators Don Hall, Chris Williams, and Roy Conli admitted that they felt a genuine pressure to make the film do well after last year’s Frozen cash flood.
“Can we finally say that we did feel pressure?” said Hall.
“Because we’ve been saying that we didn’t. But, no, you know, we were all thrilled by the success of Frozen because it’s a little hard for everybody to understand, but we all kind of work on each other’s films. Chris [Williams] actually storyboarded on Frozen and did the voice of Oaken, and we all contributed just like Chris and Jen, the directors of that movie, contributed on this movie, giving us notes and stuff like that. So we all have ownership over everybody’s films.”
“It is such a team at Disney animation right now,” added Roy Conli. “It’s an amazing team that works together on every project. So I looked at it as just an inspiration.”
When asked about the greatest challenge of establishing a Marvel style origin story, Williams responded that it was actually more of a balancing act.
“We’ve all been at Disney, each of us, for about 20 years, and every movie is hard, but they’re hard in their own way,” said Williams. “And I think you’re getting to the heart of what was uniquely difficult about this one which was taking all the disparate elements and bringing them together. And there are two distinct genres we were taking on, a super hero origin story, and a boy and his dog or a boy and his robot story and we had to tell one without making it at the expense of the other.”
The human relationships stood at the forefront of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, almost to the point where we hardly realized that they didn’t just go up and shoot the movie on foreign planets. It’s this delicate balance that the VFX team for Interstellar was challenged with, though they ensured that the effects would only provide the setting for what would ultimately be a human drama.
According to visual effects artist Paul Franklin, he was able to relate to the film for more than one reason.
“Just to make this film I had to go away from my home for over a year, away from my young children,” said Franklin. “So I felt very much an empathy with the character, with Matthew McConaughey’s character, and that helped inform everything you do, particularly in the end sequence of the film where we’re trying to maintain the emotional intensity while also providing a spectacular result.”
But then again, it was more than just backdrop. They were actually able to be there on set to put the actors into the actual scenic environment of the film in order to avoid the dreaded Phantom Menace effect, according to visual effects artist Paul Franklin.
“What we were able to do is we were able to bring that visual reality onto the set,” said Franklin.
“We used live in‑camera projection. Whenever you’re looking out of a spacecraft window, you’re seeing what the actors actually saw on the set. So we weren’t using green screen, we were doing it live. And our sets were more like simulators than regular sets, and so that level of photographic reality informed everything that we did.”
Beyond that, they ended up consulting with a higher power in order to correctly illustrate some of the more majestic wonders of the universe.
“This time we had the access to the amazing skills of Kip, who is one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists,” said Paul Franklin. “And he gave us the maths, the physics which describes the universe and how these extraordinary things would actually look if you were able to go and see them.”
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