Oscar winner Interstellar's black hole had an Indian inside it

MUMBAI, INDIA: We know who went home from the red carpet walking happy with the Academy Award for visual effects for their spectacular work on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

But what makes it special is that there is an Indian nameplate shining on that trophy too. The award went to an European VFX house, Double Negative, which interestingly is part of India-listed Prime Focus, an independent and integrated media services powerhouse.

The award was presented to VFX Supervisors Paul Franklin (one of the founding members of Double Negative) and Andrew Lockley, SFX Supervisor Ian Hunter and New Deal Studios’ VFX Supervisor Scott Fisher at the 87th Annual Academy Awards held on 22 February at the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles.

This is the second Oscar for Double Negative and Paul Franklin, having previously won for Nolan’s Inception. Interstellar beat other nominees that included Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy and X-Men: Days of Future Past.

A week ago Double Negative had also won the BAFTA for Special Visual Effects for the same film. Double Negative provided all the visual effects for the space odyssey, with New Deal Studios providing miniatures and Scott Fisher heading up SFX. The Dneg team was tasked with the challenge of accurately depicting the film’s wormhole, its supermassive black hole (Gargantua), the Tesseract (a four dimensional space allowing time to be seen as a physical dimension), digital space vistas for projection on-set (no green screen was used in any of the space sequences), CG versions of the robots and the population of alien worlds with giant waves and landscapes of frozen cloud and ice.

Reacting to the news, Namit Malhotra Founder, Executive Chairman & Global CEO, Prime Focus said, “This is an incredibly proud moment for all of us at Prime Focus and Double Negative. I want to congratulate, Alex (Hope), Matt (Holben), Paul (Franklin) and the entire team of Double Negative for bringing home this exceptional honor. I have always been a great admirer of Mr. Nolan’s films and hence it is really heartening for me to see our work on Interstellar being recognized as the world’s best. On this joyous occasion I want to reaffirm our commitment to help Double Negative continue on its path of creative excellence that is second to none”.

Next ahead, Double Negative has a spectacular line up in 2015. Under production projects include Terminator: Genisys, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, Mission Impossible 5, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, Ant-Man, Insurgent and Grimsby. Projects just delivered include Jupiter Ascending, In The Heart of the Sea and Ex Machina.

Prime Focus Limited (PFL) claims to provide end-to-end creative services (visual effects, stereo 3D conversion and animation), technology products & services (Media ERP Suite and Cloud-enabled media services), production services (shooting floors/sound) stages and equipment rental) and post production services (Digital Intermediate/color grading, sound and picture post) to Studios, Broadcast and Advertising industries.

In mid-2014 Prime Focus Technologies acquired DAX, a provider of cloud-based production workflow and media asset management applications; Prime Focus World merged with Double Negative, one of the world’s foremost providers of visual effects; and Reliance MediaWorks merged their global film and media services business with Prime Focus. Prime Focus has operations in Bangalore, Beijing, Cape Town, Chandigarh, Delhi, Goa, Hyderabad, Johannesburg, Kolkata, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, New York, Singapore, Toronto and Vancouver.