“We humans are confined to our brane.”

The 2014 science fiction film Interstellar, from acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan is the first Hollywood movie to attempt depicting a black hole as it would actually be seen by somebody nearby – (Interstellar – Building A Black Hole) (Interstellar IMAX® Featurette) (SKY HD – Nolan’s Odyssey) It is also then of no surprise to that the book Black Holes and Time Warps from Kip Thorne was a major influence on the film. The actual filming was done on one handheld IMAX camera (35mm and 65mm film) only, this for intimate scenes as well as the major visual shots or action sequences. Even computer effects were avoided because Nolan favoured location shoots across the world, and huge projections of the cosmos on set backgrounds. The Double Negative Visual Effects (DNEG) team with VFX Supervisors: Paul Franklin, Andy Lockley, VFX Producer Ann Podlozny, CG Supervisors: Eugénie von Tunzelmann, Dan Neal, 2D Supervisors Julia Reinhard Nendick and Chief Scientist: Oliver James even developed a brand new code called the Double Negative Gravitational Renderer (DNGR) (VIDEO) only for Interstellar. With a release date of November 7th 2014 in the US, a production budget of $165 million, and a current US gross of: $187,255,480, and foreign: $484,700,000 ($671,955,480 total), Interstellar may not have reached the home box office its production companies and distributers were hoping for. Instead Nolan’s scientific approach and close collaboration with physicist Kip Thorne is leaving the world a much more interesting new legacy. Namely a full paper on February 13th, this from the established journal for physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists in the fields of gravitation and the theory of spacetime: Classical and Quantum Gravity (READ HERE) (PDF)

• Even tough you might read in some of the articles online (hollywood marketing machine) that this is the first time in history that Kip Thorne and DNEG tried to attempt depicting a black hole with a computer is simply not true. In 1979, french astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet published the first computer generated image of a black hole accretion disc, which quickly became a classic – Color Animation of a Black Hole with Accretion Disk – VIDEO. Hence the photo used in my article being the original very first black hole creation by Jean-Pierre Luminet from 1979. 

More: The Truth Behind Interstellar’s “Scientifically Accurate” Black Hole, Interstellar’s fake black holes are helping actual scientific research, VIDEO – Making Of Interstellar – Behind The Scenes (Narrated By Matthew McConaughey), WIRED, How Building a Black Hole for Interstellar Led to an Amazing Scientific Discovery.. NOTE: The Quote “We humans are confined to our brane”, comes from Kip Thorne. A brane is a physical object that generalizes the notion of a point particle to higher dimensions.. It’s not a spelling error for the word brain. Photo credit: Jean-Pierre Luminet. Enjoy!