Time dilation has been used as a plot device in mythology all around the globe since at least the 10th century. The most famous story is that of Japanese fisherman Urashima Tarõ. He leaves for a three day trip to meet the emperor and his charming daughter, but when he comes back to his hometown, 300 years have gone by. There are versions of this story in China, Ireland and the United States. To this day in Japan, time dilation as described by the theory of Relativity is called the Urashima effect.
Making a movie set 90% in a spaceship without risking claustrophobia or visual fatigue was a fascinating challenge for Nicolas Bazz. Obviously, every square inch of the set was explored but it's mostly through the huge window on the universe that the "Space road-movie" fulfills its promise.
Not only the crew's path through the galaxy (and beyond) mirrors the actual make up of the known Universe, but, to guarantee full control over his virtual sets and vistas, Nicolas Bazz asked the visual effects supervisor, Yann Bazz, to design a director friendly "Universe Engine".
"Space vistas creation" is Nicolas Bazz' fifth credit on this film.
Before the shoot even started, Nicolas Bazz (producer) and Yann Bazz (VFX supervisor), made a pact. "No more than a hundred VFX shots".
And then Nicolas Bazz (as director this time), got involved.
After a full day of shooting and trying to avoid the green screens as much as possible, he realized the risk of doing a claustrophobic movie, which is absolutely not the intention. And so the brothers made a new pact: there will be as few VFX shots as possible... But not one less. There are 750 VFX shots in the finished film. It's more than Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) (380 shots), but less than Avatar (2009) (2500), it's what was needed to tell the story of those characters properly.
The main challenge of green-screen shooting is neither technical nor financial. We've all seen behind the scene footage of actors staring at ping-pong balls or a guy in a leotard with white spots that will later be replaced by Gollum, a Transformer or an intelligent ape. It takes a lot of discipline and imagination from the actors and absolute accuracy in the direction to pull off. But how do you look at a black hole? No ping-pong ball can do justice to the wonder, fear and humility such a spectacle should evoke. The "black hole gaze" was the focus of many rehearsals, often up until a few seconds before shooting each of those shots.
The Big Everything's black holes aren't holes and they aren't black.
They are of a specific type called Microquasars. The black sphere at the center, called the event horizon, is only a part of a whole. The accretion disk is the sum of all the matter the event horizon attracts in an ever accelerating spiral, some of which gets ejected before falling into the horizon, in relativistic particle jets.