Interstellar

On Interstellar, Sylvan was part of DNEG’s R&D team, working on the wormhole. He rewrote Houdini’s Mantra renderer as a curved-ray tracer that worked alongside DNGR, DNEG’s own renderer, so its “relativistic raytracing” could fit within the studio’s lighting pipeline. His lighting tools, shading code and ocean tools were also used across the film’s Houdini work, including the giant wave on Miller’s planet.

The wormhole and black hole work was done with physicist Kip Thorne and the DNEG team led by Oliver James, and it led to a paper in Classical and Quantum Gravity (read it on arXiv). Sylvan has since given talks about it to more than a dozen student groups. DNEG’s work on the film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

Being part of something that turned out to be real science, as well as a film, is still one of my favourite things.