As Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer continues to be one of the most successful 2023 movie releases, the film’s VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson has just shed some light on a common misconceptions about the making of the biopic. Ahead of the movie’s release, Nolan memorably shared that the Trinity Test was recreated for the movie “without the use of computer graphics,” but due to those statements, Jackson has felt he needed to clarify how the scene was made.
While the atomic explosion you see in Oppenheimer is not in fact a computer generated image of the first nuclear weapon detonation, Jackson cleared up how the sequence was achieved. Per his interview with The Hollywood Reporter,
Some people have picked that up and taken it to mean that there’s no visual effects, which is clearly not true. Visual effects can encompass a whole lot of things.
To be clear, computer-generated imagery (CGI) is a style of animation or illustration from computer programs that often create the explosions we see in movies. Oppenheimer’s explosion is not CGI, however it did employ visual effects (VFX), which is when effects are added to already existing imagery or film. As Jackson continued:
[Nolan] didn’t want use any CG simulations of a nuclear explosion. He wanted to be in that sort of language of the era of the film … using practical filmed elements to tell that story.
Oppenheimer's Timeline Explained: The Movie's Major Events In Chronological Order
For the production of Oppenheimer, filmed images of things like smoke and explosions were shot on the movie’s 65mm IMAX cameras before a computer program was used to layer them together and make it look just like the Trinity Test. Jackson also said that their vision for visually showing the Trinity Test explosion was a “a sort of loose artistic interpretation” of the event, rather than “an accurate representation of the physics.”
Jackson also shared that the production employed the use of four 44 gallon drums of fuel along with some high explosives under that to capture the key moment in Oppenheimer. And as far as the moment between the actors as they watch the explosion, that was done using an optical lighting effect that was done on the set rather than a digital filter. If you were curious what the heck Nolan meant by not having CGI effects for the Trinity Test scene, hopefully your questions have now been answered!
Oppenheimer has been a surprise summer hit, making $723 million worldwide since being released in theaters on the same day as Barbie in July. Its commercial success even allowed the movie to extend its IMAX run through the end of August too. It’s quite impressive considering biopics don’t typically make so much money in theaters. You can still check it out on the big screen now, especially if you want to really look closely at the crew’s work on recreating the Trinity Test explosion without CGI.
