Watch OBLIVION’s Bubbleship In Action

Tom Cruise stars in OBLIVION, an original and groundbreaking cinematic event from the visionary director of TRON: Legacy and producers of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. On a spectacular future Earth that has evolved beyond recognition, one man’s confrontation with the past will lead him on a journey of redemption and discovery as he battles to save mankind.

Have a look as OBLIVION’s cast & crew share how the bubbleship came to life and then pop over to the film’s official site – http://www.oblivionmovie.com/ – and listen the film’s exhilarating score. Composer Joseph Trapenese has collaborated with artists for several of the most anticipated soundtracks of recent memory: from Daft Punk (TRON: Legacy) to Mike Shinoda (The Raid: Redemption), as well as M83 (“Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming” and OBLIVION) and Moby (“Extreme Ways” from The Bourne Legacy).

Abutting the living space on the Skytower set is a landing pad for the Bubbleship, Jack’s primary form of transportation as he travels to and from Earth’s surface. Director Joseph Kosinski was thrilled to see the vehicle he imagined several years ago—a hybrid of a jet fighter and a Bell 47 helicopter—finally come to life. “The Bubbleship was the first thing we designed for the film,” he offers. “For everyone who grew up on Top Gun, like I did in the ’80s, it is pretty spectacular to see Tom back in the cockpit flying an aircraft like this.”

OBLIVION features thrilling, vertiginous new heights experienced when Jack pilots the Bubbleship, liberated from linear flight for a freewheeling, 360-degree freedom of kinetic aerobatics and crazily choreographed dogfights. Cruise discusses the experience of being on the Bubbleship: “Joe showed me the drawings and the concept art, and I just thought, ‘this is so cool.’ I’m a pilot, and I love the way he designed it. It’s as beautiful as it is on screen. Every piece of it was so smooth and elegant, and they designed it to fit my body for all the action.” He laughs, “I want someone to build it so we can fly it for real.”

For more than a year before the beginning of principal photography, the team at Wildfactory in Camarillo, California—led by key designer Daniel Simon—crafted a flying apparatus of the future. Once approved designs were in place, the Bubbleship took four months to build in a warehouse in Los Angeles. Then it was taken apart, shipped off for filming and subsequently reassembled in Louisiana, Iceland and Mammoth, California. Sums Kosinski of the creation: “It’s this hybrid of a Bell 47 helicopter that’s hanging in MoMA in New York City and a jet fighter.”

For the design, Simon was inspired by emergent NASA technology. Still, he knew how critical it was for the audience to comprehend how the Bubbleship might be able to fly. From dials, foot pedals and joysticks to a seat with lumbar support, the cockpit resembles a helicopter, while still evoking a futuristic craft. Made of aluminum and fiberglass and weighing in at 4,500 pounds, the Bubbleship travels in seven containers, with four technicians accompanying the vehicle. It has to be disassembled for air cargo, and it may only be lifted by forklift. It takes five hours to assemble, with a four-person crew working nonstop on all of its parts.

The Bubbleship components include the fuselage, cockpit, tail boom, two engines, flippers and landing gear; all of these parts have small panels that need to be assembled by hand. The landing gear serves as the base of the plane and holds the rest of the vehicle upright, while the two motorized doors to the cockpit open simultaneously.

Simon discusses the vehicle’s structure: “In the concept of the whole design process, it was a given that the Bubbleship should look insect-like and lightweight. That’s why we came up with this finessed and fragile landing gear; it’s actually three legs. At the beginning of the design, we had it the other way around: We had the two legs in the back. It’s based on a futuristic, compound structure, and it’s capable of flying in space and in the atmosphere. It’s a combined spaceship plus flight vehicle, completely designed from scratch.”

Production designer Darren Gilford expounds that the team needed to build a few incarnations of the Bubbleship. He says: “We had the complete Bubbleship, which is out on the bubble pad at the Skytower set; then we had just the cockpit on a full-motion-based gimbal. We received all of the flying footage, then in visual effects the rest of the ship was put on the backside of the cockpit. Then we built a couple other pieces. For example, we built a few crashed Bubbleships. It’s been more fun than you can imagine.”

Visual effects producer Steve Gaub is extremely proud that the team’s hard work has paid off. He says: “The Bubbleship design is impeccable, and it’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen. In VFX we were able to give that thing weight—all those little nuances and movements that make it feel like it could fly and move around. We’re familiar with helicopters and we’re familiar with planes, and this is a hybrid. So a lot of attention to detail was put in there to make the audience believe that this thing was built and can fly.”

On Stage 6, the Bubbleship gimbal was constructed. Housing an identical replica of the Bubbleship cockpit—though one without glass—this rig was able to simulate air travel with the help of a green-screen background. Indeed, the VFX team later doctored in the landscape details and lighting variations. Similar to a ride at an amusement park, the cockpit (with two seats) was attached to a motion base. On its axis, the gimbal can rotate 360 degrees; therefore, the effects of centrifugal force and gravity on Cruise and Kurylenko are obvious to the audience.

Rams and hydraulics, with accumulators in the middle, made for 1,700-psi storage. When the computer-programmed and -controlled Bubbleship gimbal demanded a move, voltage was sent to command it to go either left to right or up and down. The gimbal’s motion base resembles a flight simulator with six degrees of freedom and six cylinders that form a hexapod.

The gimbal rig was bolted to the ground and had the capacity of tilting to a 45-degree angle, 22 degrees up and 22 degrees down. For these moves, the cast wasn’t required to wear a full harness, only a seat belt. With the expertise of special effects coordinator MICHAEL MEINARDUS and stunt coordinator Alonzo, the gimbal created the illusion that the cast was actually flying an aircraft.

The VFX team put in the cockpit glass and the rest of the Bubbleship—as well as environments and landscapes that the craft flew through and across—during postproduction. In fact, the backgrounds plates were shot in Iceland and are actual landscapes specific to the country. These plates were filmed precisely to match the Bubbleship action shot on stage and some were modified with visual effects after principal photography wrapped.

2077: Jack Harper (Cruise) serves as a security repairmen stationed on an evacuated Earth. Part of a massive operation to extract vital resources after decades of war with a terrifying alien threat who still scavenges what’s left of our planet, Jack’s mission is almost complete. In a matter of two weeks, he will join the remaining survivors on a lunar colony far from the war-torn world he has long called home.

Living in and patrolling the breathtaking skies from thousands of feet above, Jack’s soaring existence is brought crashing down after he rescues a beautiful stranger from a downed spacecraft. Drawn to Jack through a connection that transcends logic, her arrival triggers a chain of events that forces him to question everything he thought he knew. With a reality that is shattered as he discovers shocking truths that connect him to Earth of the past, Jack will be pushed to a heroism he didn’t know he contained within. The fate of humanity now rests solely in the hands of a man who believed our world was soon to be lost forever.

Cruise is joined in this epic action-adventure by Academy Award® winner Morgan Freeman (The Dark Knight Rises, Wanted) as Beech, leader of a band of survivors who are highly suspicious of Jack’s motives; Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace, Seven Psychopaths) as Julia Rusakova, a traveler who has crossed time and space in search of true love; Andrea Riseborough (W.E., Happy-Go-Lucky) as Victoria “Vika” Olsen, Jack’s by-the-book navigator who is ready to depart Earth forever; Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Mama, television’s Game of Thrones) as Sykes, second-in-command of the revolution and the first to want Jack eliminated; and Oscar® winner Melissa Leo (The Fighter, Frozen River) as Sally, the commanding officer overseeing the evacuation who has an agenda of her own.

Director/producer Joseph Kosinski has assembled an elite behind-the-scenes team of frequent collaborators to transform his graphic novel original story into an epic motion-picture event. They are led by Oscar®-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda (Life of Pi, TRON: Legacy), production designer Darren Gilford (TRON: Legacy, Idiocracy), Oscar®-winning VFX supervisor Eric Barba (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, TRON: Legacy), VFX producer and co-producer Steve Gaub (TRON: Legacy, Terminator Salvation), co-producer BRUCE FRANKLIN (TRON: Legacy, Terminator Salvation) and orchestrator Jospeh Trapanese (TRON: Legacy).

OBLIVION was shot in stunning digital 4K resolution on location across the United States and Iceland, including interiors in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, and exteriors in New York City, New York; Mammoth, California; and across Iceland.

OBLIVION will be in theaters and IMAX April 19th.

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