The on-screen adaptation of Ender’s Game is already filled with enough gorgeous cinematography to get space nuts drooling, but no scene hits that space envy button quite as hard Ender’s Zero-G stint in the battle school war room. Design FX for Wired talked to the film’s graphic team to see what it took to make those near-operatic sequences match up to the physical constraints of space.
It turns out, even though the actors were actually spinning wildly on wires and suspension devices during filming, it’s nearly impossible to get a human body on Earth to mimic the effects of a zero gravity environment. So as soon as they got shots of the actors’ heads flying about, it was time to chop off the bodies and replace them with beautiful, computer-generated counterparts. It’s not quite as glorious as really floating in zero gravity, but at least they can take a few pounds off in post. [Wired]