Double Negative gets Prime Focus its first Oscar

The company, which merged into Prime Focus, did fabulous SFX work on Interstellar

This year, India’s claim to fame at the Oscars has come in the form of Namit Malhotra-led Prime Focus, through its association with acclaimed VFX house Double Negative, which bagged the Academy Award for visual effects for its work on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Double Negative was merged into Prime Focus last year.

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 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.
 
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."