There is a sense of familiarity to the environment in which we find ourselves. Having been educated for sixty years by the James Bond franchise, we know an MI6 operations room when we see one. The space is confined. The technology is impressive. The tension is palpable.

Welcome to Fireworks, an impressive short film directed by Paul J. Franklin, two-time Academy Award-winning special effects wizard who worked with Christopher Nolan on such films as The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception and Interstellar, the latter two of which brought him home those Oscars.

A native of Cheshire, England, the 56-year-old began to develop his creative side as a student at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University. Initially intrigued by the emerging world of computer graphics, he delved into that as a way to help with his original ambition of being a sculptor. As he worked more extensively with computers, he discovered he could not only animate his sculptures but make them move and come to life. With films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park inspiring him, Franklin set out to explore this new creative challenge through designing sets and posters for school dramas.

Finding motivation in the dramatic narrative, he turned his attention away from sculpting, and in 1998, co-founded Double Negative Visual Effects, the London-based studio which has since grown to be one of the world’s largest providers of feature film VFX. It was here that Franklin’s world changed when he encountered Nolan in 2003. Franklin has always known that he wanted to try his hand behind the camera, and while a full-length feature is in the works, he saw an opportunity to wet his feet with a short when the script for Fireworks crossed his desk.

I must admit after watching the short, I was hoping there would be seven more episodes to show what happens next. Why did you choose to tell the story as a short film?

FRANKLIN: I think short films are a really exciting format because there’s no frivolity, no room for self-indulgence. You need to get down to the story straight away. And myself and my collaborators, Annalise Davis, who produced Fireworks, and our writer Steve Lally, we all so firmly believe that a short film should be no longer than 15 minutes, that it’s not really a short if you go beyond that. I think when you are working within those limits, it pushes a bit harder to tell the story.  So, short films always attracted me as a medium.

What was it about this story that sidetracked you from your own feature pursuit to direct it?

Steve (Lally) had come up with this idea for this very short, tight, contained piece of drama set inside an MI6 special operations room in London at the MI6 building. I just responded to the characters. There were these amazing characters who were really fascinating individuals and were doing this incredibly important job, they are supervising a mission that’s going down in Libya, where they have been tracking down a dangerous militant and they are about to take this person out after four or five years of tracking this person. But the last thing that’s on their minds is the potential consequences for the people who are in the line of fire, the people who might become this terrible term, collateral damage. Instead, they are interested in, are they going to get the job they want, can they go for lunch, can they take a bathroom break, can they get their supermarket shopping in on time?  So, it’s all sort of trivial things that I think beset most of us in our daily lives, it’s just that these people, their job is altogether more serious than a person who works in an office.  And I just thought that was a fantastic setup and so we started exploring the ideas from that initial reading, I just called a meeting and I said this is fantastic and we were going to figure out how to make this thing.

Part of figuring that out is your creative use of the new LED technology. How essential was that?

The original script was just set inside the ops room, we never saw that side of it.  We saw security feats and surveillance cameras and satellite views on the monitors, on the desks inside the ops room. But that was really all we saw of Tripoli. So, the people in Tripoli were reduced to the status of blots in a video game, dots on a screen, depersonalized. That to me was a really important part of the story that we were trying to tell. But as we developed the script, we became more convinced that we had to see these people properly, we had to make them into real people. We had to know what this place was, and we had to give it equal value and equal weight as the world of the ops room. Because that’s something that I think that is a common trope in Hollywood films: you think about all those films, secret service, espionage films, Mission Impossible, Bourne Ultimatum, there’s always a scene inside a control room with lots of monitors, they are looking at some far off distant place. But that far-off distant place is always just rendered in terms of being a videogame. The people at the other end of those screens almost don’t matter. We wanted to make them into real people. And so, we came up with this idea that we would blend the two worlds together, we would see both worlds simultaneously in the same frame. We thought about doing it with what I would describe as a traditional visual effects process using a green screen and CGI, but this new technique of virtual production, where you bring what would have been visual effects and images, you bring them to the set, and you display them with these very high-resolution large LED screens.

How much of an advantage was it for you as you moved into this new technology to have a history with Christopher Nolan?

Well, the best film school in the world was to spend ten years on sets, standing next to Chris Nolan, as we were making the Dark Knight trilogy and then Inception and Interstellar. Because Chris is a very collaborative filmmaker, and he wants you there as a creative partner during pre-production, production and then of course during post-production, which is where all the heavy lifting and the visual effects world goes on.  Just seeing the way Chris works, the way he works with his cast, the way he works with his crew, that is just an absolute inspiration.  You learn a lot through osmosis.  He expects you to take responsibility for what you are doing.  If he wants you to go off and get some additional plates or shoot some extra stuff from the helicopter or whatever, design a sequence for the film that was going to be created in visual effects, he will give you full autonomy there.  You have the toughest critic in the world to get past because his standards are tremendously high. But also, you are absorbing things from all the other H.O.D’s (heads of departments) that you are working with.