We Spent 100 Days Recreating OPPENHEIMER without any CGI. Felipe and Michelle recreate the entire explosion scene or bomb scene (trinity test) from the Christopher Nolan movie Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy, using practical effects only. The cinematography in this scene was particularly challenging to recreate due to the multiple lighting changes, and the fact that we don’t own a high speed camera. Also, Nolan and his director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema shot mostly on Imax, with lenses that were specifically crafted for this biopic: an expensive format that we don’t have access to.

In order to recreate the Trinity Test shots, we had to build a bunker set from scratch, a miniature Los Alamos, and test multiple different chemical reactions to film the bomb at different frame rates. At the end, due to our budgetary constraints, we had to use color correction, some masks while editing in post-production in order to match every frame: but everything you see was achieved in Premiere Pro only without any VFX or CGI.