Realizing the Many Worlds of ‘Dark Matter’

VFX Supervisor John Heller and MPC VFX Supervisor Greg Astles share their adventures in bringing to life the multiple distinctive environments that anchor the acclaimed Apple TV+ sci-fi thriller.

‘Dark Matter,’ now streaming on Apple TV+. All images courtesy of Apple TV+.

It’s something that’s happened to all of us. You’re going about your daily business, when, without warning, you’re abducted into an alternate version of your life – in fact, numerous versions of your life, each transpiring in a unique universe with its own unique challenges. Such is the premise of Dark Matter, the Apple TV+ series starring Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connelly, and Alice Braga, and created by Blake Crouch, based on his novel of the same name, which was just renewed for a second season.

If the multiple transformations his native Chicago undergoes test the resources of physicist Jason Dessen (Edgerton), his trials were matched – fortunately, in considerably less harrowing fashion – by the exploits of the visual effects teams that had to create each of those distinctive environments. From the extreme habitats of “Ash World” and “Water World,” to the utopian “World 26,” the visual effects artists were tasked with realizing a vast array of landscapes, any one of which would have been a considerable challenge on its own.

We spoke with VFX Supervisor John Heller and Greg Astles, MPC’s VFX Supervisor, about the many worlds of Dark Matter and how they came to be.

Dan Sarto: Once the show got going and really leaned into the underlying quantum realm idea, it got really, really interesting. It also must have been very challenging, in that you had to create a large number of individual realities, which were essentially one-offs. John, we’ll begin with you. I'm assuming you came on early. What did you have to work with when you started?

John Heller: As is typical when you come on during pre-production, there's always this existing body of work that is starting to leak out from the art department and production design. And then luckily we had a lot of access throughout the entire process to [creator Blake Crouch]. And you nailed it when you said one of the biggest challenges was with all these worlds that we had to create, each of which had to feel like a world that could exist, even though it's still on Earth. We don't go to the moon, we don't go to Mars. We're not in some heightened alternate really. One of the few rules that Blake laid out for us is that it had to all look real.

Early production designs always start out looking fantastic, and we had to drill that down as we went through the process. As we were trying to find our way through, we would bump up against a hyper-realism or hyper-view, which we had to peel back to ground it a little bit more, so that it felt like something that you could actually walk around in without it being too theatrical.

DS: Greg, when did MPC come on and what were you involved with in the beginning?

Greg Astles: When I came onto the show, about March of last year, they were still shooting. Our big thing was going to be Ash World, and John had invited me down to Chicago to see the neighborhood, see exactly what we were going to be changing into Ash World and Water World and World 26, all the environments that we were going to be working on. He wanted me to get a feel for the city and really get to know these iconic locations. And particularly for World 26, which is the super-modern world, John shared the art department concepts with us pretty early on, so that we had a good chance to flesh those out, to put our own spin on it, and make it work with the photography so that it felt grounded and real, even though it was futuristic and sort of sci-fi.

DS: Along those lines, we all know that concept art often is largely inspirational. How much did you have to alter that design work?

GA: We had some good concept work that John gave us to start. We passed that off to our concept team, and they scoured the internet to find cool eco-friendly architecture ideas, stuff that would reflect energy sustainability and so on, and tweak that and meld it with the art department concepts to come up with our own takes on it. So we took inspiration from that, and we would send John our concepts and then get feedback from him and make adjustments. But, yeah, the art department stuff was almost more like a mood board.

JH: I agree, it had to evolve. A lot of the art department stuff was really beautiful paintings, but they weren't in that world. A lot of the other inspiration did come from the internet, but we also had some people, some professors at USC, that we engaged with to determine what might be built and designed. We also partnered with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and we were able to put in his mile-high building that was never realized.

As Greg said, we had a mood board, sort of a quilt, if you will, of all these different elements that we thought were appropriate. And then, once we had the final photography, we had to go through another evolution, because a building you designed just looked utterly absurd in a certain setting. So, once we had the shots delivered in the actual photography, MPC started doing their own mockups and their own building, even single building design. We didn't utterly disrupt the entire Chicago landscape, but there were a lot of buildings that were either greatly enhanced or replaced by bespoke buildings.

GA: In particular, the Obama building went through numerous design iterations. We designed it from one angle, and we went through several rounds of feedback on that, and then, when we finally got the photography, we realized that everything we designed looked really cool from 500 feet in the air, but it didn't look like anything from ground level, which is where the photography was taking place. So we had to go in and tweak our designs again through another few iterations to get something that worked for all of the angles from which we were going to be seeing it.

DS: Did you use previs, John, and if so, what was it used for?

JH: We had our own in-house team, so we had a visual effects art director, and he worked with a couple of artists. We had three or four people who took what was coming out of the production design team and implemented that in a way that made sense in the visual effects world. Because many of the environments were one-offs, a concern was how to ensure some sort of homogeneity between all of them. Is it a color palette? How do you make sure you’re not just bouncing from one world to the other with no connective tissue? So, really, we had to take what was coming from the art department and start putting it into previs, animatics, moving storyboards, our own camera angles, sometimes directly related to a location, as in Ash World.

We went there, we photographed, we did a lot of mock-ups and walk-throughs with CG cameras to lay out the scene as a proof of concept. MPC started working on it later, after we had it all in the can, but we went through all of those steps with our in-house team so that we could be well-informed and have a good plan by the time we got into post-editorial. We built a really strong language about what we were doing with the use of that previs, and I think a lot of that helped inform what Greg and his team were doing.

GA: Yeah, particularly for Ash World, we took some of that and then did postviz on it. We have a postviz team in L.A. that we use, and they helped us to flesh out particularly the building-destruction sequences, so that we could nail down the feeling of it before we built all the assets and simulated everything. We went through a couple of rounds of that with John to really nail down the beats, get the timing down, get the feeling of danger. We also did some postviz on some other episodes, including Water World.

JH: The beauty of it is that, by the time you get into postviz, Blake and the other creatives and producers at the studio have already seen multiple versions of what we're trying to achieve. For Ash World in particular, it's a very interactive narrative – they're responding to what's happening around them, and it has to feel like they're going to get killed any second if they stay there. So all that timing had to be worked out before we started really spending the sweat equity and money on simulations and rendering.

With Water World, there’s the scene where they’re sinking into Lake Michigan and they save themselves by closing the box door. We're in this dark volume of water, then we’re in this corridor and the water's washed away. Our challenge here was, how do we tell this story in terms of what the camera would be seeing and doing? There was a lot of postvis work on that by Greg and his team. We even wound up changing our camera angles and going to fully CG shots because we just didn't like what we were able to achieve in camera the way that we originally conceived it. Most of it was in camera, with a lot of CG water enhancement and environments, but a couple of the key shots at that moment when they closed the door all had to be done fully CG.

DS: Apart from Ash World and Water World, were there any other really challenging sequences or environments that you want to talk about?

JH: We started with over 30 different worlds, which we ended up paring down to 21. I can't even remember how many ultimately made it into the show. But for what we called Snow World, you had people walking around in that environment for 14 pages. A lot of that had to be recreated. As with Ash World, there was a lot of pre-planning and it was all fairly well worked out, because we didn't know where we were going to shoot that scene for the longest time. And we had a very mild winter in Chicago, so we didn't really have any snow. None of that environment was at all real.

DS: Did you have much need for digital doubles or similar tools?

JH: We did, in a lot of scenes. It was a combination of split screens, blue screens, element shoots, sprites and fully CG digi-doubles.

GA: That was one of the things that John called me down for. We scanned Joel [Edgerton], Alice [Braga], and a few of the other actors.

JH: We had a scan truck come on set for three days, because we were beholden to hair and makeup and their schedule for the different versions of Joel, and we just got as many of the variations as we could. We did some face work, even though we didn't have to do a lot of dialogue and facial animation. But that was sprinkled about and was utilized. We always try to scan as much as we can.

In the last scene, where we had about 30 actors in the room, they all had to be replaced by fully CG digi-doubles. The particular challenge here was that we’ve been seeing Joel in almost every shot in the entire show, and now we had to make 75 Joels, interacting with each other in this room. And there were plenty of other scenes where you'd have one or two of them in the same shot. So that was a big challenge.

DS: Any final thoughts?

JH: One of the things in the show that I really like, some of the most haunting moments, is when they're driving down Lakeshore Drive in an empty Chicago, with the plague drapes in the windows. We had to do a bunch of removal in the backgrounds, but we got a lot of that in camera.  We were the first production in Chicago's history to shut down Lakeshore Drive, which we did at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, when it was empty. It looks just the way we shot it. That was fantastic.

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Jon Hofferman is a freelance writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He is also the creator of the Classical Composers Poster, an educational and decorative music timeline chart that makes a wonderful gift.