Gravity

In the visually stunning film "Gravity," Sylvan, as a senior lighting artist at Framestore, lit a number of pivotal shots and developed the look and lighting for the metal ISS modules. The shots shown here are some of his work on the film, many of which are iconic moments, such as the parting of Matt (George Clooney) and Ryan (Sandra Bullock), the impact sequence where it all falls apart, and Ryan finding her way back into the ISS.

The project was not just a great technical challenge but also a very pleasurable experience, largely due to the lovely and talented team at Framestore.

A technical part of Sylvan's contribution was his innovative approach to lighting, originally something he developed for Poseidon at MPC in 2006. This technique involved pre-rendering certain scene elements into HDR 360 latlong images. These images, along with a specially designed shader, were then used to light hero objects in the scene more efficiently. This method significantly reduced the overhead of managing large and complex scenes, while maintaining the spatial relationships essential for accurate lighting. 

This sort of technique is widely used these days, but it was able to be applied on Gravity thanks to the Arnold engineers (a very talented bunch) who rapidly added a new camera type to Arnold at Sylvan's request, to allow him to use the technique. A large portion of the major destruction sequences and a number of key close-ups were lit using this, which could lessen render times by up to 70%.