By: Faiq Iftekhar
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary
cinematic experiences of the past decade. Not only because of its dazzling storyline and
breathtaking visual effects but because it remained true to its science.
Physicist Kip Thorne was an executive producer for the film who kept a close
eye on its scientific fidelity.
The score of the film also had a big part in the film’s success. It was produced by German
film composer Hans Zimmer, famous for producing numerous film
soundtracks. Zimmer composed the whole soundtrack after receiving just a single line of
dialogue from Chris. He spent the entire day composing it and was later on approved to
be the film’s main score.
The special effects were so extensive, the team had to develop new technology.
Some individual frames took up to 100 hours to render, the computation overtaxed by the bendy bits of distortion caused by an Einsteinian effect called gravitational lensing. In the end the movie brushed up against 800 terabytes of data. They thought they might cross the petabyte threshold on this project.
Moreover, this film would be incomplete without mentioning its stunning visual effects.
It won the BAFTA award for best visual effects, which was presented by the man himself,
Stephen Hawking! It opened up new possibilities for visualization of black holes, which
would soon go on to be true and turn out to be a massive success for space exploration.
Faiq Iftekhar 