One of the first shots I've worked on for this film was one that featured a black hole. After seeing Interstellar's 'Gargantua', I was inspired to create something similar, given the scientific accuracy of Interstellar's black hole.

I worked for a couple of days experimenting with various methods of creating a black hole, my first attempts were in After Effects - hoping to achieve something with various warp and distort effects. The result wasn't convincing, so I moved to Cinema 4D and started experimenting there instead.

I came across a viable method which involved setting up a torus object to take the place of the gravitational lens. Adding a transparent and refractive material to the torus allowed the stars behind to distort through the mesh, and zip around the outside of it. A pure black sphere was placed in the centre to act as the black hole, and then a disk was placed intersecting these two objects, which was animated to rotate. The disk had a texture map applied to it that I built inside Photoshop. Below, you can see an un-textured, and a textured version of the black hole.

A background of stars was loaded into a sky object, and I also composited a separate layer of stars directly behind the black hole to exaggerate the stars movement. The one hindrance that using this effect yielded is that the effect of the stars moving is only controllable based on the cameras position in relation to the torus (which is actually accurate, albeit not that flexible). I came up with a method to keep the distortion the same as the camera moved by having the torus constantly target the camera. This kept the facing of the torus constant, in turn keeping the level of distortion constant.

The animated version will be available for viewing once the film is released, for now, here is a screenshot of the composited shot!