Into The Gorge: Building a World on the Edge

Directed by Scott Derrickson, The Gorge demanded a world that felt both deeply rooted in reality and just far enough removed to make your skin crawl. Towering cliffs. Endless forests. Brutalist towers standing like silent sentinels. And, of course, the gorge itself, a rift in the earth that’s as much a character in the film as any human.

DNEG’s VFX crew created that world, entirely in CG. And not just for a few shots, we built an environment that holds up to scrutiny across seasons, sequences, and even a full-scale apocalypse.

Designing Isolation

Tom Norman, Environment Generalist TD Lead says, “We wanted the location to feel isolated and epic. The gorge itself needed to feel ominous and vast, it acts as a physical barrier between the characters and is a constant presence throughout the film.”

The team referenced a wide palette of real-world locations: the mossy stillness of Winterfold Forest in the UK, dramatic Alpine ridges, and rugged North American ranges. But this wasn’t just about beauty. The gorge had to feel imposing, believable, and always present, grounded enough to be real, cinematic enough to unsettle.

Building Nature, One Leaf at a Time

Creating hundreds of shots meant finding the balance between detail and optimization.

“Every object or bit of detail we add has a cost, We leaned heavily on instancing and only detailed the areas seen by camera. Efficiency was everything,” Tom Norman explains.

That meant building in layers, photoreal forests, dense underbrush, the fog that clings to the gorge floor, all optimized and rendered for speed and scale. For added realism, the team relied on world-space projections and reference photography, along with custom shading and detail enhancements from DNEG’s DMP team.

Where Brutalism Meets Nature

“You’ve got this massive gorge, dense forests, concrete towers, and dramatic mountains, all in one frame.” says Tom Brown, EnvGen Lead/Supervisor.

Making all of those elements sit together without visual conflict was the challenge. The gorge couldn’t overpower the towers. The towers couldn’t feel out of place. The forests had to feel lived-in, not too pristine. Through countless iterations, the team adjusted gorge scale, forest density, and even the color temperature of the mountains to hit that perfect visual rhythm.

And Then We Blew It All Up

Literally.

The film’s final act features one of our most ambitious FX sequences: a massive, multi-shot nuclear explosion that consumes the environment in terrifying detail. Our FX team created a “Mexican wave” of smaller explosions leading to the main detonation, melting forests, shredding towers, and leaving nothing but dust in its wake. Read more about it in our blog, Anatomy of a Shot | ‘The Gorge’: Building the Blast

From Reality to Ruin

The Gorge was a test of scale, fidelity, and control. Every tree, every cliff edge, every plume of fog was crafted to pull the audience deeper into a world that feels familiar…but never safe.

It’s not just about what we built. It’s about how The Gorge made you feel while standing on the edge.