Douglas Trumbull has been called a visionary, genius, a creator of masterpieces, and these are just a few amongst many other such nicknames. So when Terrence Malick, the director of The Tree Of Life, needed a special effects supervisor for his 22 minute birth of creation of the universe, Trumbull was the obvious choice.
Trumbull, who has been nominated for five Academy Awards and has received the American Society of Cinematographer’s Lifetime Achievement Award, was approached by Malick and told that computer-generated imagery was not what he wanted. Trumbull asked Malick, "Why not do it the old way? The way we did it in 2001?"
Using a variety of materials for the creation of the universe sequence, Trumbull worked in co-ordination with visual effects supervisor Dan Glass. “We worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be,” said Trumbull. “It was a free-wheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business. Terry didn’t have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.”
The Tree Of Life is sure to be a visual treat for our viewers, and with Friday just around the corner, there has never been a more awaited movie by the audiences.
