The story behind the visual effects in Theory of Everything

The journey of any man or women who defy the usual and surpass all expectations is never easy. The life of Stephen Hawking was no different. Fighting the battle of mind over body when Motor Neuron Disease took over his life, Hawking has spent all his life proving that even when your body fails you, the mind can go on. But that is not what the movie about. This movie talks about the bittersweet love story of Stephen and Jane Hawking while he battles his disability to achieve all he has. That is where the visual effects team at Union VFX and Adam Gascoyne came into the picture. It was their job to bring forward Hawking’s visualizations in subtle to keep it in sync with the theme of the film. That is the story behind the visual effects in the Theory of Everything.

So what exactly did Union VFX do for the movie?

Enhancing the content of Hawking’s monitorWith so many words on it, it was tough to read the contents of the monitor. The first thing Union VFX had to do was enhance the content and make it easier for the audience to read on screen. This also gave the VFX team the opportunity to use the real device and present the words that were being input during the dramatic moments in the movie.

The set and what they did to add to itWhile most of the movie was shot in UK, it was set all over Europe. This called for the augmenting the environments needs for the movie. The case in the point here being the airport sequence where the a number of mountains were added to the background.

Background for the car shots

Union VFX went a little old school here using the matte paintings with a low loader with the scene shot on green screen first.

What was the secret behind the full theatreThey went old school here again. They moved the crowd around different spots in the theatre and stitched the matte painting together creating the illusion of a full theatre.

How did they make the journey in space shotQuoting Adam Goscoyne in an interview with artofvfx, “We pre-vised it first to nail down timings and concepts and then created most of it using Houdini. The nebula were based on the Hubble space telescope pictures but we made up the shapes and position of these from scratch. We wanted to create a move that also worked well with the orchestration so the various elements were placed synchronously to punctuate the music. We fly through black holes and into the central nervous system and course through the body along with the blood cells and finally fly out through the eye into space again. We tried to tie together all the visualisations we had created in the film.”

The one shot were we didn’t expect VFX!The scene where Hawking’s experiences his first fasciculation. They used several live action plates for this and made it really convincing!