This collection does not include smaller clips, only full length videos and clips over 30 seconds. Additionally, videos focused on personal messages to specific fans are not included, only more general messages for the wider fandom.
The collection will be updated as more Cameos are shared, if there is a video I have missed please feel free to dm me about it!
Jane Prentiss and Nikola Orsinov cosplay I made for the Statement Begins 10 year Anniversary of TMA. I gotta say, I had the time of my live and want to thank each and every one of you who were so very kind to me and my friend!
Here in a different light so you can see the details better
you know how people are using the ryan gosling cinematic universe to expand ryland grace’s backstory
what if dead man’s bones was grace’s college band
after phm is launched someone online inevitably digs up that grace was in dead man’s bones in college and they go super viral online
at some point rocky hears grace humming the same tune over and over and asks him about it, and grace is reluctant to say much at first but rocky eventually pries it out of him and demands to hear their discography
rocky loves the music and eventually once they get to erid convinces grace to perform one of his songs for the pebbles “for earth learning purposes” but then the pebbles tell their parents and everyone wants to hear grace perform
in the end ryland grace becomes the first person to (reluctantly) go platinum across multiple planets for music he had barely thought about in over a decade
Yk what fucks me up, that scene where Grace was playing the lava game w his students.... bc it literally foreshadows Grace’s entire character arc. His students hand him the 🌍 toy, asked about the Petrova line, and when he tries to pass, they were like “nope!🤚 you can’t pass” like it’s just a joke.
Ff to the actual plot where the entire planet basically hands him the actual Petrova problem and suddenly he genuinely can't pass that responsibility to anyone else. UGH. the movie really said “btw this silly classroom moment is the whole plot” and hid it in plain sight. 🧍
I visited the FMX lecture of Stuart Penn who broke down the VFX work behind Project Hail Mary. Here are some nice behind the scenes facts:
Side note: I’m no animator or VFX artist. I have a meagrely basic understanding of VFX works and thus cannot assure everything I’m about to repeat is entirely accurate since I didn’t understand everything.
Post Production took 2 years with a crew of 600 VFX people.
Penn has a PhD in physics, which, in combination with Andy Weir, caused some very scientifically accurate space ship work. However, the question of how a PhD affects his work in sci-fi movies, he answered “I have to hold my tongue a lot”
The ship set was split upon five stages, each part having to exist in two states of being: normal during centrifuge and flipped to the side during lightspeed. The ceiling and walls had to be removable for wire work during Zero G moments. That was particularly tricky in the cockpit, a round room with functioning screens and buttons on every panel.
Their work on Zero G scenes was mainly focussing on removing wire work and adding floating objects. Their priority was to keep as much of the camera and acting work as it was. Fun Fact: during the iconic shot where Grace looks out the window and sees Rocky’s ship for the first time, he does this majestic 180 turn. His hair is fully CGI in that scene because Ryan Goslin’s hair flipped and moved too much.
During his first scene in Zero G, his little pack of candy splits open and all of the candy is spilling in all directions. The directors thought it’d be funny. The VFX people who’d have to edit dozens of individual candies floating around thought it was less so lol. Apparently during the entire cockpit scene, you can continue to see the candy floating around in the background.
There was no Green/Blue screens, so all the screens you see on the Hail Mary are real screens. The reason they wanted to avoid Green/Blue screens was because they didn’t want to intervene with the gorgeous lighting of the film and wanted to avoid green or blue hues spilling. And gosh darn that was the right decision!
The xenonite was a pain in the ass because there were so many reflections to edit. Not only do they have to edit out the puppeteers, but also the puppeteers reflections, as well as the camera’s reflections. And the fun isn’t over there. If one of these removals is in the way of Ryan Goslin’s reflection on the xenonite, they have to edit Goslin’s reflection back into the xenonite.
The xenonite also has a refractive surface so they had to add that whenever they had to edit Rocky behind a wall of xenonite.
The epilogue with Rocky In his xenonite suit is 100% CGI because of three reasons: They have built a xenonite suit for point of reference, which made it difficult/impossible to puppeteer with, though. Since they were filming on location, they were worried about breaking the puppet because of sand or water. Filming on open location risked someone taking a picture and leaking Rocky’s design long before it would be shown to the public.
There were four different ways they bought Rocky to live: Puppet, Animatronic, Puppet with CGI enhancements and full CGI. Certain scenes were impossible to do with puppetry because the puppeteers would block the camera or because the space would be too tight. If they only needed one puppeteer they could (sometimes, not always) manage to cut a hole in the floor or xenonite panel, but if there was much movement that would require more than one puppeteer, It was impossible -> therefore CGI. In order to get the full CGI Rocky to still have that puppetry vibe, they purposefully made some of the leg movements out of synch and less “stinky” as he phrased it. They also oriented themselves closely on physical things. The animators had a mini-version of the ball that they can roll around to see how it moves. And they always had a frame of reference for Rocky.
Their biggest priority was to make Rocky emotive, which is why they sometimes enhanced certain puppet movements, exaggerating them in a way that would be too difficult/impossible for a puppeteer in such a tight space. Example moments: Rocky skittering away after hearing the scary text to speech voice; Rocky banging against the glass next to Grace’s head during the Life is Reason moment (I think that’s why Grace has no reaction to Rocky freaking out like that. It just makes the scene more funny). But sometimes it was simple things like the puppeteer blocking a certain limb from the camera which is why they need to add that limb themselves.
Whenever Rocky’s ball was moving around a lot and very chaotically, it’s 100% CGI. They would rehearse beforehand with a ball so Goslin and the camera know where to look and point to, but the actual shot wouldn’t have anything in there. Whenever it was static, though, they would have the ball.
For very emotional scenes they would always try to have the puppet there so Goslin would have someone physical to act against. Also the scene where Grace gives Rocky the earth-ball, it’s all physical except for the bendable xenonite panel which was added with VFX. They had difficulties trying to design a bendable xenonite panel, since xenonite was very solid. But I think they did a fantastic job.
For the scenes of the ship from the outside, they had a MoCap studio where a handheld camera was linked to a 3D model of the ship in real time. That’s why some of the exterior shots looked hand held. They literally had a hand held MoCap recording to use as reference. Someone (I think it was one of the directors even) was in a MoCap suit, acting as a stand in for Ryan Goslin and they rehearsed the Canister Catch scene that way. Fun Fact: the iconic shot of Grace’s shadow on the hull after catching the canister was a “happy little accident”. Inside the MoCap studio they noticed that from that certain angle Grace would throw a harsh shadow on the hull’s exterior and decided to shoot it that way on set.
*I have taken no audio or video recordings of any kind. All of this knowledge merely comes from my attendance at the FMX festival and notes I have taken on paper and ballpoint pen, thus I haven’t broken any copyright rules that we have been strictly made aware of.*
