The Oscar-worthy film Gravity took its audience to brand new heights with breathtaking performances from Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. The most captivating stars, however, are the inanimate objects both onscreen and off.

The special effects are truly the stars of Gravity. When Alfonso Cuarón, the director, helmed the film, the technology that he requested was not even invented yet, so Cuarón got help from Framestore, a VFX company based out of London. From the company, he recruited a team of Visual Effects specialists called VFX engineers, and took on the task of creating space, millions of miles above the Earth.

According to the BBC News, the film is composed of about 80 percent digital shots, and each frame took about 50 hours to render fully. Gravity is a combination of advanced and new VFX, CGI and Motion Capture. Motion Capture is a type of technology used in films, such as, Avatar, Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Framestore worked on the latter film using Motion Capture.

Framestore is one out of many VFX companies growing out of London. Buzzfeed reported that over 400 engineers from Framestore worked on Gravity for three years straight.

Chris Lawrence, a VFX engineer on Gravity, talked about how deadline driven and focused everyone had to be on this project.

"There was nowhere to hide--everything they created had to be on full display, maybe for ten minutes at a time. It had to stand out under intense scrutiny," Lawrence said. (Click here for full video of a VFX rendered shot from Gravity)

Gravity has already captured VFX audiences. According to Entertainment Weekly, Cuarón was honored with the Visionary Award at the VES Awards. Gravity won six awards in total, including the top award for Outstanding Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture.

The VES Awards are both a litmus test and a predictor for who will win the Special Effects at the Oscars. It has been this way for four years straight; Life of Pi won both awards last year.

It's films like Gravity, with its marvelous visual effects and excellent story, that fully entertain and satisfy the movie-going public.

This film and many others, reported in The Washington Post, have been memorialized by video essayist Nelson Carvajal. In a five-minute video, Carvajal celebrates the best visual effects in 40 years of film-making. It culminates with Gravity. (Click here for the video essay.)

Related