Trumbull, the Oscar-winning go-to guy for epic visuals, created effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner. For Tree of Life, he teamed with Dan Glass (Matrix Reloaded) and got to work.
They used a variety of materials, according to Cinematography.com, to create the majestic stream of imagery that can be seen in the exclusive video embedded above.
“We worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be,” Trumbull told the moviemaking website. “It was a free-wheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business. Terry didn’t have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.”
Expanding upon its limited theatrical release, The Tree of Life opens in additional cities Friday. Winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the sci-fi-inflected PG-13 drama stars Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain.
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