Share That video was amazing, it kicked me in the gut. I didn t expect it to, he said, before admitting to feeling emotional.
In addition to thanking the HCA, he spotlighted the people who have really done right by him, even when he didn t have a place to live as well as the friends who he has known and grown with.
Trailblazer Award: Ahead of the 48-year-old actor superstar s acceptance speech, the virtual ceremony paid homage to his legendary career and extensive charity work
Reciting an old adage, the Ballers star reminded listeners: People will never forget how you make them feel.
Much of it is the work of Co-VFX Supervisors
Matt Kasmir and
Gravity. Despite it being fairly obvious for
The Midnight Sky to be VFX-driven, many watching it might not realize how many aspects of the film relied on VFX.
Fortunately,
Below the Line had a chance to speak with Matt Kasmir – unfortunately, Lawrence was indisposed at the time – for the following interview where we go into great depth on the visual effects for
The Midnight Sky.
Below the Line: I know you and Chris worked on Gravity, but you were at different houses at the time, right?
Matt Kasmir: I’d actually just left
Cinematic visions of the near future are often bleak, but in George Clooney’s “The Midnight Sky” production designer Jim Bissell wanted the stark environments to also have a sense of poetry. The film, set following an undefined global catastrophe, follows a lone scientist (Clooney) as he journeys across the Arctic with a mysterious young girl in hopes of stopping the spaceship Aether from returning to the catastrophe that Earth has become.
For Bissell, who worked closely with cinematographer Martin Ruhe and VFX supervisors Matt Kasmir and Chris Lawrence, the visuals needed to evoke the sense of isolation felt through the narrative.
It wasn’t
that long ago when you could watch the Oscars, see what movie won the award for cinematography and think, “OK. That might be the best picture winner too.” In the ‘90s, the two awards went hand in hand six times. “Dances With Wolves,” “Schindler’s List,” “Braveheart,” “The English Patient,” “Titanic” and “American Beauty” all pulled off the feat. In the ensuing two decades, it has happened just twice “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Birdman.”
Instead, the correlation now comes between director and cinematographer. Alfonso Cuarón won both Oscars for “Roma.” Two years before that, “La La Land” swept the two honors. “The Revenant,” “Birdman,” “Gravity” and “Life of Pi” also won both.
If anything seemed appropriate by the end of 2020 it was the arrival of a prestige film with a post-apocalyptic plot, especially one set in the aftermath of a global catastrophe that leaves few survivors.
Directed by and starring George Clooney as an aging astronomer who may be one of the last people alive on Earth following a mysterious pandemic event, “The Midnight Sky” also comes at a time when the world continues to reel from the COVID-19 crisis and the heightened sense of mortality it brings. In his dual role, Clooney may be the ideal guide to help us make sense of what it means to be so precariously close to oblivion.