What's Edmund's Planet (from Interstellar) Like?

[KAL 9000]

The movie never gives us any good info on it, other than it's habitable and Edmunds and Brand land in a desert. Do you guys know what it's like?

[Frybert]

What you saw is what you got.

[Majorjim!]

Yeah I thought the movie missed so many opportunities to show off the planets. They should have had long shots, and detailed views of it from orbit. I thought the whole movie was rushed and preposterous.

Edited February 5, 2016 by Majorjim

[Bill Phil]

8 minutes ago, Majorjim said:

Yeah I thought the movie missed so many opportunities to show off the planets. They should have had long shots, and detailed views of it from orbit. I thought the whole movie was rushed and preposterous.

And loud.

I think it's similar to Earth gravity wise, at least.

[vger]

11 minutes ago, Majorjim said:

Yeah I thought the movie missed so many opportunities to show off the planets. They should have had long shots, and detailed views of it from orbit. I thought the whole movie was rushed and preposterous.

Ironically though, the film had a pretty insane running time anyhow. It's almost three hours long which puts it on the level of Lord of the Rings. That's a LONG film for something that's trying to find a healthy balance between entertaining AND intellectual.

Granted anyone on these forums is accustomed to spending hours at a time planning trajectories, or just zooming out from a ship to watch a planet spin for minutes or hours at a time. We almost instinctively know how "slow" space travel is. If Interstellar had another hour added to it, most of us Kerbals wouldn't care. But the audience who doesn't eat/sleep/breathe space, they would. And let's be honest. That film was created to promote an interest in space exploration. This means ultimately it was meant to grab people who previously didn't care about space. Those of us who are already space jocks, we weren't the target audience.

Edited February 5, 2016 by vger

[Nuke]

also they left it wide open for a sequel.

[fredinno]

9 hours ago, KAL 9000 said:

The movie never gives us any good info on it, other than it's habitable and Edmunds and Brand land in a desert. Do you guys know what it's like?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_planet

Little water, habitable, and 0.8Gs, a sub-Earth, about the size of Venus. That's all we know.

[Spaceception]

2 hours ago, fredinno said:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_planet

Little water, habitable, and 0.8Gs, a sub-Earth, about the size of Venus. That's all we know.

.8Gs? Where did you get that number?

Also, a planet with .8Gs would be a terran, not a subterran, it would be on the edge between the two however.

[cubinator]

All I know is the planet is capable of rock slides and has breathable air.

[Majorjim!]

16 hours ago, vger said:

Ironically though, the film had a pretty insane running time anyhow. It's almost three hours long which puts it on the level of Lord of the Rings. That's a LONG film for something that's trying to find a healthy balance between entertaining AND intellectual.

Granted anyone on these forums is accustomed to spending hours at a time planning trajectories, or just zooming out from a ship to watch a planet spin for minutes or hours at a time. We almost instinctively know how "slow" space travel is. If Interstellar had another hour added to it, most of us Kerbals wouldn't care. But the audience who doesn't eat/sleep/breathe space, they would. And let's be honest. That film was created to promote an interest in space exploration. This means ultimately it was meant to grab people who previously didn't care about space. Those of us who are already space jocks, we weren't the target audience.

I disagree. There are plenty of things they could have cut from the movie and replaced with some long orbital shots. Even 30 seconds would be better than the total lack of grand orbital shots.

[fredinno]

9 hours ago, Spaceception said:

.8Gs? Where did you get that number?

Also, a planet with .8Gs would be a terran, not a subterran, it would be on the edge between the two however.

Sorry, confused that part with Mann's planet. 

[AeroArchonite_]

The distance shot of the Black Hole showing Einstein's curvature of space is still pretty cool.

[vger]

Just now, AeroArchonite_ said:

The distance shot of the Black Hole showing Einstein's curvature of space is still pretty cool.

I think half of the CGI budget got blown on the curved space stuff. Maybe they've got something now that's more efficient at it, but generally, rendering software HATES refracting light.

 

2 hours ago, Majorjim said:

I disagree. There are plenty of things they could have cut from the movie and replaced with some long orbital shots. Even 30 seconds would be better than the total lack of grand orbital shots.

Yeah, I see your point. Sadly, taking time to stop and smell the roses is a rarity in films these days. Which is strange, when we're living in a world where special effects are more amazing than ever. I think too many directors these days feel like it's poor etiquette to pause the action for any length of time to draw attention to an effect, as if it means they're just "showing off."

[Majorjim!]

Just now, vger said:

I think half of the CGI budget got blown on the curved space stuff. Maybe they've got something now that's more efficient at it, but generally, rendering software HATES refracting light.

The original render of the 'black hole' was far more complex and Kip and others thought it would be too confusing for audiences, so they toned it down. CGI is not expensive these days, so I am told.

Just now, vger said:

Yeah, I see your point. Sadly, taking time to stop and smell the roses is a rarity in films these days. Which is strange, when we're living in a world where special effects are more amazing than ever. I think too many directors these days feel like it's poor etiquette to pause the action for any length of time to draw attention to an effect, as if it means they're just "showing off."

 It is a real shame. I think scenes like the docking are far more like 'showing off' than a silent, sweeping wide angle shot of a planet from orbit.

[Bill Phil]

1 hour ago, Majorjim said:

The original render of the 'black hole' was far more complex and Kip and others thought it would be too confusing for audiences, so they toned it down. CGI is not expensive these days, so I am told.

 It is a real shame. I think scenes like the docking are far more like 'showing off' than a silent, sweeping wide angle shot of a planet from orbit.

Kind of like in 2001? A lot of slow shots, only building onto the suspense.

[Majorjim!]

22 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:

Kind of like in 2001? A lot of slow shots, only building onto the suspense.

Yup, proper film making!

[vger]

3 hours ago, Majorjim said:

 It is a real shame. I think scenes like the docking are far more like 'showing off' than a silent, sweeping wide angle shot of a planet from orbit.

Like I said before though, they're not stopping the action. The whole thing is an action shot, like watching a fist fight in Matrix bullet-time. Maybe locking the camera to the hull was a bit much, but that made it easier to drive home how insanely difficult the process was. Maybe we should write a petition to Chris Nolan for a special director's cut.

 

2 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Kind of like in 2001? A lot of slow shots, only building onto the suspense.

Then sometimes you can just go too far. It's in my namesake, so it's probably no surprise that Star Trek TMP doesn't bore me to tears. A lot of folks playfully call it "The Motionless Picture." I think it's pretty clear though that they were drawing heavily on 2001 for inspiration. I can understand people whining about the 'cloud tunnel' sequence but the rest of it provided the most realistic depiction of how these massive ships would actually move. It gave Star Trek a more believable evolution from Earth's NASA days than any other Trek project. I love the slow passes of the ship model, watching it power up, and then maneuver at a cautious pace out of space dock while tiny people on EVA's appear in the foreground. It's beautiful. It's also ironic that given its age, the ships look more realistic than they do in any of the later films.

Edited February 7, 2016 by vger

[Nuke]

18 hours ago, fredinno said:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_planet

Little water, habitable, and 0.8Gs, a sub-Earth, about the size of Venus. That's all we know.

sandworms?

[A35K]

Not about Edmund's planet, but is it possible to have 'solid clouds' like Dr. Mann's planet? I guess if the atmosphere is thick enough, but wouldn't that be a problem for living there?

Edited February 7, 2016 by A35K

[benjee10]

As a film student & a VFX artist, I feel I can have some input based on comments made earlier in the thread (a little off-topic, apologies, but it still refers to Interstellar specifically):

To understand many of the decisions made in Interstellar you need to know a little bit of its production history. Initially the film was not to be directed by Christopher Nolan but would instead have been helmed by Steven Spielberg, and as such, the first drafts of the script are much more Spielbergian and 'family-friendly' in nature, with a faster pace and increased fantastical elements, such as aliens, evil robots and backwards time travel, and the laws of physics are treated a little more loosely overall. In around 2012, Spielberg left the project and Christopher Nolan was invited to take over (the script was penned by his brother and frequent collaborator Jonathan). At this point it's not clear how much was locked down in the script and how much freedom Nolan had to change things (production was already gearing up so there will have been certain things which were locked in place by the studio; after all, they've given the green light to a specific project and don't want to end up with something wildly different.) 

My guess is that Nolan didn't have a huge amount of leeway and that certain story points were very much locked in place (the dust, the wormhole, the ice planet, sabotage to the Endurance, Amelia separating from Cooper at the end, all of which are present in the 2008 script) so had to make choices more in terms of the technicalities of shooting the film rather than the overall story. As such, you actually get one of the finest examples of 'proper film making' in the last few years; the film is shot almost entirely on 70mm IMAX film at a time when the majority of films are shot on easier to use but inferior in quality digital cameras, as was also projected wherever possible using traditional film projectors. The film pretty much single handedly revived Kodak's dwindling film stock production line from the dead. Then there's the fact that the vast majority of spaceship shots in the movie are miniatures or 'maxatures' as they were dubbed in the movie, some of which up to fifty feet long and taking days to film for a single shot in multiple passes (just like the techniques used in 2001!) Nolan also refused to use green screen at any point, traveled to real locations, built fully enclosed sets lit only by their diegetic lights, etc. etc. He also obviously chose to emphasise realism wherever he could without breaking the bounds of the story which had already been pretty much set in stone. Hence you have beautifully realistic depictions of wormholes and blackholes while the physics of the spacecraft are questionable at best (even if their aesthetic is pretty much spot on)

And talking of long shots from orbit: what about Saturn? 

One of the most beautiful scenes depicting the sheer scale of space (much like 2001 does) in an understated way. You don't get that sort of grandeur in later sequences because the film is shot in such a subjective way; you are always positioned with the characters. There are very few wide shots detached from the ships and most of the time the camera is crammed into the cockpit with the characters (side note: this is also why the interiors of the ships are so large; there needed to be room for the bulky IMAX cameras and the film crew to move about once the doors were closed, since Nolan didn't want to disassemble the set and break the sense of space to get the shots he wanted). Because of this subjectivity, we're experiencing the events as the characters do, and later on (especially the water planet), as the situation becomes more fraught and fast-paced, we're seeing effectively a series of vignettes heading down to the planet. Nolan's trying to emphasise how rushed and unprepared they are; we don't get a long, beautiful establishing shot because the characters are rushing headlong into a situation they know almost nothing about, and have no time to get their bearings. The comparison with 2001 isn't really fair because they're two films trying to achieve different things and have very different tones by design. It's like saying all films should be shot in one take because Birman was shot in one take and it worked there so why don't they use it in everything else?

And can we just put to rest this idea that CGI is somehow cheap? It's a complete falsehood. You'll have hundreds of people working on a show for months or years at a time (Interstellar's VFX people were involved from pre-production; I've actually had the pleasure of talking to the guy who was technical supervisor on the waves scene and he stressed the importance Nolan places on having pretty much all the VFX prepped before shooting even begins) and the price is increased by the studio covering costs of software licenses (Maya is not cheap), computers capable of rendering out video high enough resolution for IMAX prints, and R&D. These costs are increased even more when you have to write an entirely new rendering software specifically for one film in order to accurately depict gravitational lensing combined with super-high-res physical simulations. CGI is only ever cheap if it's rushed and low quality, which Interstellar's isn't by any stretch of the imagination. And AFAIK 'toning down' the black hole simulation didn't make it any less complex, it's just as high fidelity, it just meant they reduced the amount of turbulence in the accretion disk. So the CG in that shot is just as expensive as it would have been if they'd stuck with their original. 

[fredinno]

4 hours ago, A35K said:

Not about Edmund's planet, but is it possible to have 'solid clouds' like Dr. Mann's planet? I guess if the atmosphere is thick enough, but wouldn't that be a problem for living there?

No, because you'd be asking for the atmosphere (N2 and O2) to freeze to -210 C. Unless the "gas" was water vapour, then yes, you can have solid clouds.

[vger]

8 hours ago, A35K said:

Not about Edmund's planet, but is it possible to have 'solid clouds' like Dr. Mann's planet? I guess if the atmosphere is thick enough, but wouldn't that be a problem for living there?

Mann was lying anyway just to get rescued, and made up the story about a habitable biome beneath the surface. Can't remember offhand if anything was said about the composition of the atmosphere while they were down there. In the grand scope of all things in the universe, there's probably a way it could happen. But even then, the frozen clouds in the film don't sit right with me. If the clouds are made of something lighter than the air around them, then why do fragments of them begin to fall after the ship collides with it? They should simply drift away and remain buoyant. That makes it even more complicated. It implies that the clouds are actually NOT lighter than air, but the molecules are clinging to something at the core which IS light enough to counter the weight. It could've been done better.

Edited February 7, 2016 by vger

[benjee10]

The clouds are one of the bigger scientific fudges in the movie (and, interestingly, one of the most obvious hangovers from the 2008 Spielberg script, which has a full underground ecosystem beneath the ice clouds) and pretty much make no sense. They look cool and sound like a cool, plausible phenomenon when they're dismissed with a single line, but as soon as you apply any sort of physics to them they crumble away. I can't imagine there's any way structures like that could support themselves on a world with 0.8G. 

[AeroArchonite_]

I think they messed up quite a bit on the water planet too, not so much in the graphics, but the timescale. In the film, they were splashed down for about 20 minutes, even though the movie called that 23 years (20 minutes calculates out to about 2 years 122 days). I know gravity changes time pace, but it seems like the tsunami could've been easily avoided. I also noticed that the water was really shallow on the water planet, which seems like it would keep a tsunami from forming more than a few feet tall. Plus, it seems like on landing you would've been able to see at least one tsunami while entering the atmosphere, because tsunamis have more waves behind them.

[A35K]

One thing I didn't get about the tsunami is HOW WERE THEY NOT EXPECTING IT??? Seriously, these guys obviously know their astrophysics, so don't they realize that WATER PLANET + VICINITY TO HUGE BLACK HOLE= MASSIVE TIDAL WAVES? It's not that hard, makes me wonder why they even bother sending a ship there in the first place...