‘Oppenheimer’ visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson on recreating the Trinity Test
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Visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson has been somewhat of a good luck charm for director Christopher Nolan. Their first collaboration, 2017’s “Dunkirk,” received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The pair’s follow-up, 2020’s “Tenet,” won an Oscar for Jackson in the Best Visual Effects category – the only award that year for Nolan’s pandemic-era release. But this year, both Jackson and Nolan arguably topped what they had done together before with “Oppenheimer,” the blockbuster biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that is expected to earn multiple Oscar nominations in January.
For the film – a three-hour drama that tells the story of Oppenheimer and recreates the Trinity Test, the first nuclear detonation achieved by the United States – Jackson says Nolan had one specific edict which the visual effects team was required to follow.
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“For this script, in particular, he wanted all of the effects to be filmed – based on filmed elements,” Jackson tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview as part of our Meet the Experts: Visual Effects panel. “That’s kind of always a priority for him. But in this film, it was more like an absolute rule. We didn’t want to have anything that was not based on at least some sort of photographic input.”
That “Oppenheimer” is “a film about nuclear bombs,” Jackson says, made it all the more of a challenge. According to Jackson, both he and special effects supervisor Scott R. Fisher were “fairly confident” that “if we made a big enough explosion, we would be able to manipulate that in a way to make it feel much bigger.”
Shot on location in New Mexico and at night, the Trinity Test is a showstopping visual effects sequence – and one Jackson and the VFX team took great care to keep as faithful to the actual footage from the test as possible.
“We did a lot of comparing to the archival footage, although we weren’t ever going to exactly reproduce it,” Jackson says. “It was a sort of artistic, slightly more artistic interpretation of the actual footage.”
Jackson got his start in the practical effects world and he says using real-world elements as a foundation for visual effects only enhances the result – something he had first-hand knowledge of while working on “Oppenheimer.”
“I always think that if your ultimate test of good CG is that it looks photographic, well, starting with photographs or photographic material means you’re already halfway there,” Jackson says. “Chris Nolan’s the artist, and film is the medium that he’s chosen to work in. And that’s the way he wants his work to be done. And so it’s not for us to kind of question that, it’s on us to execute his artistic vision and energy.”
“Oppenheimer” is available on physical media and digital platforms.
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