Industrial Light & Magic brings creative commotion to the creatures and New York cityscape of A Quiet Place: Day One.By Clayton SandellAlex Wolff as Reuben in A Quiet Place: Day One (Credit: Paramount Pictures).Surviving the extra-terrestrial terror of A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) depends on the critical ability to stay absolutely silent.Setting the third installment of the acclaimed film series in noisy New York City, however, brought an entirely new level of fear to the post-apocalyptic horror world first introduced to audiences in John Krasinskis A Quiet Place (2018), while simultaneously presenting a welcome challenge for the visual effects team at Industrial Light & Magic.ILM visual effects supervisor Malcolm Humphreys says early discussions with director Michael Sarnoski focused on how to bring unique and unexpected aspects to the frightening alien invaders that use a preternatural sense of hearing to stalk their human prey.Among the thousands of New Yorkers running for their lives is Sam, a terminally-ill cancer patient played by Academy Award-winner Lupita Nyongo. Trying to escape the city as the monsters close in, Sam and her cat Frodo eventually encounter Eric, an English law student portrayed by Joseph Quinn. Sam is determined to get a slice of her favorite pizza before she dies.He wanted to make a narrative about how two different people deal with this situation in a big city, Humphreys says of Sarnoski. So this was an interesting take about trying to make something about two strangers that meet while all this chaos is happening.Concept art by Szabolcs Menyhei (Credit ILM & Paramount).A visual effects veteran of films including Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), The Batman (2022), and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Humphreys and his team helped guide Sarnoski and cinematographer Pat Scola through the complex process of making a film that required a large number of visual effects sequences. Sarnoski and Scola previously collaborated on the award-winning film Pig (2021) starring Nicolas Cage.Part of the job at ILM is just understanding the story and where we want to go, and just trying to build a bespoke solution depending on the different types of shots were doing, Humphreys tells ILM.com.One challenge, Humphreys says, was determining how the creatures with hypersensitive hearing might move and behave in a city environment like New York.In the previous films, theyre either just stealthing on a single character or theyre sort of doing a snatch-and-grab, explains Humphreys. So Michael was very keen on expanding that a little bit more. For example, how do they act with each other?During a nighttime sequence set at a construction site, the creatures behave almost like a family gathering for dinner, ripping apart and devouring a fungus-encrusted pod for food. Behind the scenes, the ILM team came to refer to the monsters by the name Happy.Theyre not very happy creatures, so calling them Happy is kind of fun, Humphreys says. Theres a really big mom thats all caked in white, and then youve got the little baby happies. The little ones have slightly bigger heads. Theyre smoother.(Credit: Paramount)When Eric accidentally makes a noise, a nearby creature is alerted and exposes its slimy, pulsating inner ear to listen more closely. Its a tense, relatively long shot that Humphreys says is also one of the films most complex.Theres an immense amount of detail that the modelers, the texture artists, and the effects artists have done, he says. Theres the eardrum thats fluctuating. Youre actually hearing Erics heartbeat, and were pulsing the eardrum and the heartbeat together.You want to get an emotional reaction from the audience, so we want to sit on this shot for quite a while, Humphreys continues. I really, really love this shot.Humphreys credits animation supervisor Michael Lum with helping develop the right movement for the creatures as they do things audiences have never seen before, like scrambling up and over Manhattan buildings.All of the creatures are hand-animated, Humphreys reveals. Theres no crowd system or anything like that. Theyre all handcrafted, which is amazing.Building out New York City was another major aspect of ILMs work on A Quiet Place: Day One that may not be apparent to many audiences, and thats exactly the goal.The areas of New York that appear in the film including the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Midtown, and Harlemwere realized as a massive partial backlot set built at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden near London. Production designer Simon Bowles and his team built two intersecting streets that could be modified and dressed into new locations as Sam, Eric, and Frodo make their way through the city.Most of the backlot structures, however, were only built two stories tall, requiring ILM artists to digitally extend the height of buildings, lengthen streets, and fill in backgrounds.Lupita Nyongo as Samira in A Quiet Place: Day One (Credit: Paramount).We did an immense amount of data capture, Humphreys explains, a process that required 14 days in New York so the team could scan and photograph more than a hundred real buildings in high resolution. We go through a whole process of building out those facades so that they can be used on many, many shots.For certain bits, weve changed quite significantly what you see in the backlot set, Humphreys reports. Theres a huge amount of augmentation and replacement.While Frodo the cat is entirely practical (played by two different feline stars, Schnitzel and Nico), a scene requiring the animal to weave through a frantic crowd running from the aliens required extensive digital artistry from ILM.Michael was adamant that he wanted to use the real cats, Humphreys recalls. There was a little bit of, how are we going to do a shot like this? We cant have a whole lot of people trampling over a cat.The solution was to photograph just the cats performance separately at first, then add people and additional elements later.That shot is actually an amalgamation of hundreds of layers of different crowd people, and really timing and trying to build that shot up so that as an audience member, you get the sense of the chaos, but you also see Frodo enough for him to register, Humphreys adds.The films finale has Sam, Eric and Frodo desperately trying to reach a boat on the East River filled with survivors making their escape from New York. The sequence is built from several different locations, including part of an airfield dressed as a deserted FDR Drive, a pier along the Thames river, a moored boat, and a water tank at Pinewood Studios.(Credit: Paramount)It was a lot of fun, but a lot of moving pieces, Humphreys laughs. Were sort of shooting component pieces and hoping that they all go together.Humphreys says his favorite visual effect is the very last scene in the film. As Sam walks down a Harlem street listening to music, the camera sweeps 360 degrees around her in a single shot lasting nearly 40 seconds. Originally shot on the backlot, Humphreys notes the sequence required complex rotoscoping and compositing, with artists ultimately replacing as much as 70 percent of the original background with images created using the data ILM gathered in New York.We actually captured three or four blocks of Lexington Avenue, so theres a huge amount of data capture for that one shot, Humphreys says. Im really proud of that one.Humphreys joined ILM in 2016 and is based at the companys London studio. But he says the work on A Quiet Place: Day One was a truly global effort.I got to work with a lovely team in Vancouver, in London, Mumbai, and San Francisco, he says. I think were just good creative partners.The one thing you get out of ILM, Humphreys believes, is that it still operates very much like a smaller company in terms of communication and collaboration, which is really refreshing.Concept art by Daniel McGarry (Credit: ILM & Paramount).Clayton Sandell is a television news correspondent, a Star Wars author and longtime fan of the creative people who keep Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound on the leading edge of visual effects and sound design.