Plus, how the VFX teams crafted a space battle, completed twinning shots, and delivered teleportation and disintegration. The follow-up to the season 4 Black Mirror ‘USS Callister’ episode is season 7’s ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’, directed by Toby Haynes. Many scenes take place on the bridge of the USS Callister. For the original episode, screens on the bridge were greenscreen, but for ‘Into Infinity’, production employed LED walls.  For visual effects supervisor James MacLachlan, the use of LED walls afforded the opportunity to design all the footage that would be seen on the screens before the shoot, and then have that run live on set. “That all reflected off the chrome surfaces and the metal surfaces, so you got a really immersive environment,” he shared with befores & afters. “Seeing the actors come on set for the first time and seeing what content was there on the LED wall, well, their reactions were just priceless. It was amazing. They were all super-impressed. It was really immersive when you were in that environment. You really felt connected.” Union Visual Effects realized the imagery that was used for playback, rendering it as moving spatial objects. “We had things like planets and moving stars and hyperspace design,” says MacLachlan. “It was a lot of moving content that was really lovely, which we were able to pan and scan as we went on the set. We created some of the establishers for some of the worlds that the Callister is hovering over larger than necessary, and then Christopher Django Johnston and the team at VSS on set with the LED wall were able to program it so that we could position that imagery and scale it slowly over time. He could bring up hyperspace, and he also had a really great button on his iPad for laser fire!” While the imagery was not intended to be real-time rendered on the LED walls, some subtle parallax shifts were achieved by having the walls themselves set back a little from the bridge set. “We felt it shouldn’t feel like a poster on the window, it should feel deeper,” notes MacLachlan. “So when we were panning or tilting, we found that we didn’t have to do too much with the wall, but if we were pushing, we would put little scales, creeps, moves and stuff, and Django was able to control that as he went.” The art of teleportation, and disintegration To travel from the ship to a planet, the crew relies on teleportation technology. In designing how the teleport effect would be seen, MacLachlan notes that “whilst it’s photoreal and we’re shooting with a camera, we needed to remember that this is a game. We didn’t want to make it look like something you could do in the ‘real’ world. We had the teleportation hub up on the ship. We sync’d the lights in the background so that they were repeatable in order for us to do repeating movements on the camera and therefore clean plate them so the actors could firstly stand in the pod, and then they would jump out of the frame and then we’d shoot a clean plate.” Meanwhile, director of photography Stephan Pehrsson arranged for a round LED light ring with blue LEDs to be placed on set, controlled to match the character entering or leaving a teleport. “It gave us this lovely reflective blue light in their visors,” advises MacLachlan. “Then we augmented that in VFX. We made it look a bit more like a deep hole rather than just a blue ring. The team at Union painted the LEDs out and replaced it with these glistening lights and a little wall of light that was based loosely off of laser lights that you get in a dance hall when the smoke machine gets going.” The teleport effect goes further to show the characters’ bodies constructing and deconstructing as cubes and polygons—again, to indicate the game side of things. “Union went through a design process for crafting the cubes,” describes MacLachlan. “The cubes would increase in resolution and decrease in resolution and reveal up through their bodies so that we had down and up, down and up on each of the sets.” Similarly, as game characters are killed at various times, their bodies go through a disintegration effect, also executed by Union. “We leaned into the polygon cube effect,” says MacLachlan. “Rather than having them explode in a cloud of dust and blood, we went for cube deconstruction. But for their deaths, it’s a very physical moment, so we decided that the cubes, rather than floating up and down like in the teleport, they would be more immersive and more physical with their presence. When a laser hits them, they would disintegrate into cubes and those cubes would then fly through the scene based on the physics of what was happening within the world, and then deplete onto a ground plane rather than float up into the air.” Twinning time At one point in the story, the characters Nanette (Cristin Milioti) and Walton (Jimmi Simpson) encounter their own digital clones, meaning the actors needed to appear ‘doubled’ in scenes together. For this twinning work, MacLachlan got to work in pre-production planning the sequences out.  “We set up an area that was marked out on the floor that we knew was going to match to some of those key scenes. Our director Toby would run through how he wanted to block it out with stand-is. Then it was a case of sitting with the DOP Stephan and working out how we wanted to shoot it. In the end, we did a mixture of techniques.” “Some of it is handheld cameras where we would shoot two or three plates coming out of teleportation,” continues MacLachlan. “I would keep an eye on the hero takes and work out where the lens was. Nicky Ruffell, my wonderful VFX data wrangler, would be on another angle. We were effectively witness cams, but live, and we would look down and then we’d just run with a bit of tape and mark where the camera lens was landing for those. Then we would repeat it for clean plates and the second passes for other actors.” A few shots were realized with a classic over the shoulder approach of the double being in the foreground a little out of focus, while a motion control shoot was also conducted, generally for wider shots on the bridge. “We had this system where Stephan was able to jump on the camera, on the arm, with the arm over his shoulder, and he was able to move around and do his move that he wanted and have Cristin come toward camera, with the double standing there. Then once that was recorded, the whole arm would record this, and then he would walk away, he’d do a pass with Cristin in the chair, and then he’d do a pass with Cristin in the foreground, and then we’d matte and mask them all together so that the interactive light was all there and it worked really well.” The space battle A battle erupts around the Callister as angry game players look to confront the ship, in and amongst the space station-like Heart of Infinity. The Heart itself—which was surfaced with printer circuit board textures, since it was intended to essentially be the center of a computer—involved complex Union animation. MacLachlan describes the look as something that needed to be “gyroscopically impressive and dominating the frame.” “It was something we didn’t want to make look like a planet that you could land on. We wanted it to feel like you couldn’t go in there, and that would increase the danger when the ship gets close, but also gave us the opportunity to play with more objects as we were moving around in the final attack sequences.” For the space battle around the Heart, Union was guided by a wealth of fighter jet, WWII dogfight reference, previs from Bigtooth, and even the show’s creators utilizing paper planes to mock out scenes. Cockpit shots were filmed with actors in set pieces with moving lights. “When you’re in a space battle and you’re moving around, you are rolling, you are barreling, you are locking over, so you can’t just have static lights,” states MacLachlan. “We had this beautiful light rig that we could arc right over them, that was a way of bringing energy to the shots as well.” Keeping it invisible While something like the space battle was a sequence that certainly required front-and-center visual effects work, this episode of Black Mirror also included a wealth of ‘invisible’ visual effects. For example, Nanette’s visit to the original game creator Robert Daly’s garage (inside the Heart of Infinity) involved a mix of effects techniques, as MacLachlan outlines. “The garage exterior was shot on location, and we found that when we were on location, the garage was actually just a little bit too small to shoot in, so the interior is actually a stage built in a studio, and was slightly bigger so that camera positions were a bit easier to work with. It’s all bluescreen exterior, so anytime you are panning around on that location, we had to incorporate plates for night and day.” Another kind of invisible effect related to earlier scenes of characters in helmets and visors. Interestingly, this might normally involve meticulous paint-outs for set and camera reflections in the helmets, but a deliberate attempt to avoid too much reflection aided in the process. “Our costume designer Matthew Price did a fantastic job on this,” recounts MacLachlan. “I was able to spend some time with him in pre-production talking about the issue of reflections. What we actually did was jump in the car and head to a local car detailer that covers car in wraps. The guy there had all these different films. He had ones that were window tints, he had ones that were for cars, he had ones that were for roofs and undercarriages. We went with a mid-level tint on the inside of the helmets and we kept gloss on the outside.” The idea was to prevent as much obvious reflection as possible with those wraps, although a few other techniques on set also helped. “For the ice planet scene, for instance, says MacLachlan, “we had some panels up the top, which were our moon/sun source, but you could obviously see those square panels in the visors. So, there was a little bit of paint out on that. But a lot of the time, the camera crew would just drape themselves in black and they’d get right in there and they would be hidden. It was quite a fantastic way of working.” The post Here’s how the spaceship LED walls on that Black Mirror ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity’ episode worked appeared first on befores & afters.