Both the sound design and visual effects of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar are masterpieces that few, if any, films have ever equaled. Although the Christopher Nolan-directed sci-fi epic focuses primarily on Matthew McConaughey's journey through a solar system to the other side of a wormhole, the sounds and look of the journey are as important as the journey itself. However, what ultimately sets Interstellar's sound design apart from other films are the unique methods by which the film's sounds were created and implemented. While the film's visual effects were created with the intent of being very pleasing to the human eye, while maintaining a high degree of scientific accuracy. Ultimately, both of these aspects are greatly enhanced in the presence of each other, creating an experience unlike any other. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Starting with the film score, the score for Interstellar was created by Hans Zimmer, who also created the score for Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and ​Initiation​. When Nolan commissioned Zimmer to create the film's score, Nolan did not provide the composer with a film script or provide him with any plot details. Instead, Zimmer was given a single piece of paper, with a page-long story about a father who leaves his son for work. After being given a day to create the score, Zimmer had created what would ultimately become the film's score, and Nolan was very pleased with the result, stating that he believes "that Hans' score for 'Interstellar' has the closest link between music and image that we have yet achieved."​ ​To create the soundtrack, Zimmer decided that a 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ would be the best instrument for creating the soundtrack, a because of “its significance for science” (Kilkenny 2014 ). Ultimately, Nolan and Zimmer conducted forty-five recording sessions to create the score for Interstellar, three times the number of sessions conducted to create the score for Inception. During these sessions, “old habits were abandoned” and “new sounds were sought” in the effort to create the film's soundtrack. When they were finished, Nolan gave Zimmer a watch, on the back of which was the words "This is no time to be careful," a phrase that would make it into both the film and its soundtrack. This adventurous and highly ambitious spirit would be perfectly captured in the soundtrack along with its effective use within the film. Within the film itself, the soundtrack would be used to perfectly convey the tone, hidden meanings and bring a phenomenal experience to the audience, whilst enhancing through the use of the film's stunning visuals. Over the course of the film, the volume of the soundtrack varied greatly from very thin to deafening to the point of drowning out all other sounds. There were moments in the film where the soundtrack becomes so overemphasized over all the other audio, that character dialogue sometimes becomes very difficult to hear over the music. Of course, when the film was shown in theaters, some viewers believed that these events were due to faulty equipment on the theaters' part, but, as Interstellar's sound designer, Richard King, stated, this was intentional because "the film cares more to convey a broader emotional tone” and “we mixed all this in a Kennedy way that people are not used to” (Kastrenakes 2014 cinema).Cinemark Tinseltown USA and the Imax in Rochester, New York, even posted signs reading “Please note that all of our audio equipment is functioning properly. Christopher Nolan mixed the soundtrack with an emphasis on music. This is the way it should sound." so that audience members would stop complaining about faulty audio equipment that was working properly. Interstellar's diegetic sound, unfortunately, doesn't branch into new and uncharted territory like the soundtrack, with a notable exception. Unlike most other science fiction films set in space, all filming that takes place in space is silent and completely soundless, as would be the experience of venturing into space in real life shots last only a couple of seconds each and take up only about seven minutes of the film's two hour and forty-nine minute running time, but their impact is very significant. Their inclusion may initially seem counterintuitive to the purpose of improving the film's sound design , as the lack of sound in these scenes would seemingly force the viewer to focus on the visual aspects of the film. However, it does exactly the opposite, as the attention to detail in the audio of a couple of seemingly insignificant shots demonstrates how much the film cares about the authenticity and quality of its sound design. Regardless of the quality of the film's sound design, Interstellar is only half the masterpiece. The other half is the film's visual effects which, much like the soundtrack, explore new and exciting territory to create a stunning experience unlike any other. The film's visual effects mainly consisted of five main examples: the Endurance, the wormhole, the two planets visited in the film, the black hole, and the tesseract. The first major example of the film's stunning visuals is the spaceship the film's characters use to travel into space, known as Endurance. Many simply assumed that the circular spacecraft and its many shuttles and landers were simply detailed three-dimensional models, due to the ubiquity of CGI in nearly every aspect of modern films. However, this was not the case, as the spaceship was a 1/15 scale “miniature” model, a very common technique in science fiction classics in the 1990s. However, the model was not small, as it was at least twenty-five feet in diameter, compared to Star Trek's Enterprise miniature, which was only eight feet long. Models were chosen over digital effects because, as the film's visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin said: "We chose miniatures because we wanted to get a sense of tactile reality," he said. “Also, by using cameras, you get the correct relationships between exposure, shadows [and] the way light moves through an object when shadows pass through it… this results in an intrinsic reality, which we thought was very important." This goal was achieved perfectly, as Endurance has a degree of realism and complexity that has rarely, if ever, been seen in another film, especially when it comes to lighting. Another example of practical effects within Interstellar were the film's two robots, CASE and TARS. While far from what modern audiences expect from intelligent machines, both of these robots were physical props, controlled by puppeteers. The only exception to this was the scene where CASE saved Anne Hathaway's character from a wave the size of a skyscraper, in which CGI was used to render CASE in the different shots of the sequence.The splash effects that CASE created by spinning in the water were created through the use of a "digitally modified quad". The second real example of the film's stunning visual effects was the wormhole that transported Endurance to the other solar system, where most of the film's significant events take place. However, the act of creating a wormhole was a challenge, as they were only theoretical and had never been observed by humans. Christopher Nolan wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, so he called upon theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to create the wormhole. Kip Thorne, who was "intrigued by the idea of ​​studying wormholes visually", worked with a special effects team at DoubleNegative in London, and provided the team with equations for how light would behave with a wormhole, which Double Negative he then used it to create a computer model to simulate these equations. The team experimented with wormholes of different shapes and sizes, such as "those with long thin throats or much shorter ones and so on." however, the team ultimately decided to use the model of a "longer wormhole", as Nolan wanted the wormhole to be visually interesting and make the audience feel as if they were traveling through a tunnel through the universe. Then there are the planets that the Endurance crew travels to throughout the film. The first of these planets, called Miller's planet, was a water world with terrifying tidal waves that dwarfed the skyscrapers. The scenes set on the planet were filmed in Iceland, while the waves were created digitally through weeks of animation by people who normally animated digital creatures (Hawkes 2014). Then there was Mann's planet, a beautiful but inhospitable ice planet, once again filmed in Iceland, on a glacier only a few miles away from where the scenes on Miller's planet were filmed. However, since there were volcanic mountains in the background of the footage, the effects team "erased the mountains and extended the background digitally, using paintings and 3D models based on the glacier itself", which resulted in an endless frozen landscape that is seen during the exploration of the planet. After Miller and Mann's journey to the planets, the film continued its visual tour to the black hole called Gargantua, which was also created through the joint efforts of Kip Thorne and Double Negative. Unlike wormholes, black holes are objects that humans have observed before, although the act of simulating one with visual effects has been no easy task. Kip Thorne and the effects team initially attempted to create the black hole using methods similar to those used to create the wormhole, but discovered that its fundamental properties required completely different physics equations. After several demonstrations with the equations provided by Thorne, CG supervisor Von Tunzelman had created a dark sphere whose boundaries were defined by a bright accretion disk. When the effects team began rendering the result, what they had created was so complex that individual frames of the black hole took up to one hundred hours to render, and over eight hundred terabytes of data were used to create what we see today. it is known as black hole rendering. the most accurate representation of a black hole ever created (Rogers 2015). Finally, there was the tesseract inside Gargantua, which was by far the most difficult task the effects team had to accomplish. To create the tesseract, Double Negative used a technique known as slit-scan photography, in which “those photos record a point in space across many moments in time, where a typical photo is a.