DNEG - Dive #behindthescenes of our work as lead #VFX partner on this unique, single-perspective film. From CG environments spanning centuries to creature animation and a large-scale tidal wave, watch how our team brought the legendary director's vision to life!

The brief? Collaborate with a legendary director on a unique and ambitious project and solve some unprecedented filmmaking challenges along the way. Where do we sign up?

Working with Robert Zemeckis as the main VFX partner for ‘Here’, our VFX, Technology, and Virtual Production teams brought their A-game to help realise the award-winning director’s vision for this ambitious production.

‘Here’ is based on a unique concept – a locked-off camera captures the events that play out in front of it across millennia, telling the stories that happen on that same patch of land as it changes across the ages.

Our VFX team helped bring the concept to life with photorealistic CG environments that evolve and change throughout history, capturing everything from human changes such as building and construction, to more organic evolution such as the passing of seasons, and even cataclysmic meteorological effects like tidal waves and the Ice Age!

Our VFX work included a four-minute continuous full 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 – for which we delivered complex CG environment builds, creature animation and multiple FX sims. Other key sequences for our DNEG VFX team were a large-scale tidal wave which required complex water sims and destruction FX, and a fully CG photo-real neighbourhood environment for the closing shot of the film.

Our Technology team were also busy on ‘Here’, developing a ‘first of its kind’ AI morphing tool to solve the challenge of transitioning the interior environment shots between time periods. The AI tool was used to seamlessly blend and morph the house interior set for transitions from one time period to another.

And DNEG 360 provided Virtual Production services during the shoot. Our team 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.