The Making of Inception- A treat for VFXers!

I came through this awesome article on twitter about the various CG effects in Inception. Most of the CG stuff was done by double negative (they are awesome!). The movie is directed by Christopher Nolan who previously gave a lot of successful films like The Dark Knight, Batman Begins. Great person with an even greater mind.

The Paris street, limbo city with the crumbling cliff face of architecture. The art department and our own concept artists couldn't come up an image Chris was happy with. Well we had this idea it was like a glacier, crumbling into the sea, with architectural icebergs floating off. But the concept images always ended up looking like icebergs with buildings embedded in them, or a frozen city. They were too fantastical, too science fiction. Chris wanted something that was recognizable. So the dneg team had the idea - take a glacier and fill it up with buildings. They had to write software to do this, to build it up like a Lego-type glacier. They ended up with a crazy mutating city set of cliffs, but when you get closer you see all the buildings. 

This Paris street scene, where it folds up into a cube was extra tough for the vfx team to achieve. They went to cities like California, New York,London, Paris etc and took millions of pics just to get to that level of perfection. To make those building overlap exactly, they had to work with a lot of precision. 
I'm not quite sure about what type of special effects the movie had, but I read the interview of the movies VFX supervisor Paul Franklin in which he said that the big rotating corridor was introduced to give that zero gravity effect. It was really a marvellous job by the SFXers too!!