How Long Did It Take You to Unclench After Gravity?

Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity set a box office record ($55.6 million) this weekend. Did you see it? Has your nervous system recovered? At any point during the heart-stopping visuals of our planet as seen from cold black space, did you consider what it would be like to be right next to George Clooney all day, but with your bodies confined to the prison of an astronaut suit rather than naked in each other’s arms as God intended? Did you hate the music at the end or were you into it? Maybe, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, you’re not buying the hype? Talk to me; all I care about today is space. I, like Buzz Aldrin, loved the movie, although Buzz found certain things unrealistic:

We were probably not as lighthearted as Clooney and Sandra Bullock. We didn’t tell too many jokes when people were in some position of jeopardy outside the spacecraft.

If you’re interested in the making of the movie, this NYMag piece is a must. Cuarón and his team have been trying to execute this movie for years, and they eventually had to invent much of their own technology:

Webber and his team had designed what would become “Sandy’s Box” — a nine-foot cube in which Bullock would spend the majority of the shoot, on a soundstage in London, strapped to a rig. On its inside walls were 1.8 million individually controllable LED bulbs that essentially formed Jumbotron screens. Getting her in and out of the rig proved so time-consuming that Bullock chose to remain attached, alone, sometimes in full astronaut suit, between takes, where she listened to atmospheric, atonal music Cuarón had selected for her. She has referred to the experience as “lonely” and “isolating.”

Also, there is an animated version of Gravity floating around somewhere, and I would really like to see it:

From the storyboards they created a digitally animated version of the film, complete with digital versions of the characters. “It looks like a crude Pixar film,” Lubezki says, “and it was so beautiful that when I showed it to my daughter probably after a year of work, she thought that was the movie.”

Lastly, Mother Jones talked to Catherine Coleman, the astronaut who advised Sandra Bullock for her role in the movie and is the only person to have ever brought a flute to space:

The dread and intensity of Gravity are (as you could guess) about the furthest thing from Coleman’s experience. “I loved it up there,” she says. “If it weren’t for my family, I wouldn’t have wanted to come home…There’s so much to do, so much research to do.”