Learn more about our team’s work on Here!
Robert Zemeckis’ Here is based on a unique concept – a film told from a single perspective with a locked-off camera, telling the stories that happen on that same patch of land as it changes across the ages!
As the main VFX partner, our VFX, Technology, and Virtual Production teams all worked together to help realise the award-winning director’s ambitious vision for this one-of-a-kind film. In a series of recent interviews, our very own Alexander Seaman, one of the talented DNEG VFX Supervisors on the film alongside Johnny Gibson and Daniel Elophe, has been sharing details on the work our amazing global teams delivered on the film.
Speaking with Creative Bloq, Alexander said, “What seemed to be a very straightforward project became extremely difficult and creatively challenging. The story is the paramount driver of the movie. It’s not a car chase film where you’re trying to wow the audience; instead, you’re really trying to emote and give visual effects a creative platform to sell the emotion of the story.”
Read on for a closer look at our work!
Era-Spanning CG Environments
Tasked with creating photorealistic CG environments that evolve and change through history, our VFX team captured everything from the construction of buildings to the changing of seasons. This also included a four-minute, continuous, fully CG shot that takes the viewer back in time to the age of the dinosaurs, covering the meteor extinction, Ice Age, thaw, and passing of time up to the modern era! To bring this shot to life, the team crafted complex CG environment builds, creature animation and multiple FX sims.
Alexander told Creative Bloq, “In terms of each individual component, the dinosaur shot wasn’t anything that we hadn’t done before at DNEG, so there wasn’t any aspect that seemed particularly complex on paper. But, trying to tell a story, that spans over 100,000 years, in one 6,000 frame shot – and telling different stories from the same view without being able to move the camera so it’s almost like the world moves through the camera rather than the camera moves through the world – the logistics of that made it very difficult from a design perspective to come up with a narrative that had the beats and pace that were required.”
Innovative New Solutions
Throughout Here, eight different storylines are taking place, happening not chronologically but constantly – and often transitioning between each other within the same frame!
When our crew was presented with the challenge of bringing Robert Zemeckis’ vision to life for these transitions, our Technology team developed an exciting, ‘first of its kind’ AI morphing tool to seamlessly blend and morph the house interior set for transitions from one time period to another!
Speaking with Creative Bloq, Martine Bertrand (Senior Researcher, AI), shared, “Visual Effects Supervisor Johnny Gibson reached out to me and said, ‘We have these transitions and they’ll allow you to move from one era to another and lots of those transitions happen inside the living room. We want to do something new.’”
With this prompt in mind, Martine and our Technology team started investigating solutions. Looking into Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), Martine had the idea to take pre-trained LDMs, trained on millions of images, and teach them to understand the semantics of Here’s world. Pulling apart the model, she exploited that latent space that acts as an abstract representation of the image, and used a GAN to generate intermediate shapes that stay semantically relevant to the current transition.
Then, using Google films, she experimented with interpolating between the two rooms which resulted in “this twirly, melty, weird kind of in-betweenness.” She continued, “I thought ‘OK, that’s not semantically meaningful, but it is melting and maybe I can now apply a clean-up pass with the generative approach on top of that and maybe that will make it melty and semantically meaningful.’ And it did!”
The final challenge was to get this new, script-like tool into Nuke for our artists to use. Commending the efforts of our Technology team to Creative Bloq, she said, “They worked together for weeks to build that tool and make it so that it would do what the artists wanted it to do. We found that in a day you could generate hundreds of different transitions, and that was something that was impossible to do before, and you could select the ones that you are most interested in and then use this alongside other, more traditional approaches (like dissolves) and combine this all together to create a very novel and interesting transition that’s just a few seconds in the movie!”
Virtual Production
On the Virtual Production side, our DNEG 360 team, alongside our friends at Dimension Studio, set up a flat LED volume that allowed the exterior environments to be seen through the on-set window. Creating the content for the volume in Unreal Engine, the assets included 85 RealTime environments, a dynamic weather system and a library of foliage and classic cars!
Discussing the use of the wall in one particularly beneficial moment – a scene where the front door is opened and snow blows inside – the film’s overall VFX Supervisor Kevin Baillie, shared with Animation Magazine: “One of the reasons that the special effects team was able to nail it is because we could see on the LED wall through the window how fierce the storm was. We could match that by dialing the amount of snow that was coming in through the door to support that in a way that everything visually made sense. That is very difficult to do if you just have a blue screen instead of the window, which leads to a lot of guesswork.”
Sharing his thoughts on bringing the film to life as a whole, Alexander told Creative Bloq, “I think that one of our key abilities at DNEG is that we are able to take a brief and complement it with additional ideas and additional designs. It’s not so much about whose idea made it into the movie, but it’s more about collaborating with everyone to get the best out of each other and getting the best and most attractive ideas onto the screen.”