The director “ ensemble ” explains how this wild final blow was made (without AI)

Since its beginnings in Sundance earlier this year, horror fans have had Michael Shanks’ new film, TogetherOn their radars. Neon took it out of the festival and, after a few truly frightening trailers and marketing, opened it in theaters last weekend with solid results. It is a provocative film, surprising and incredibly disgusting with a final viewers will not forget anytime soon. An ending that was made thanks to traditional methods of visual effects and without suspicion of AI.

According to this spoiler warning above, we are about to explain what is happening at the end of TogetherSo if you haven’t seen it and want, we urge you to look away now.

In the film, Tim and Millie (Dave Franco and Alison Brie) are infected with this unexplained force which wants their bodies to become one. The how and why behind it is quite bizarre, mysterious and fun, but ultimately, the couple realizes that the only way to defeat this force is to give in to them. And so we watch their bodies combine from two in one, and, in the last plan of the film, a completely new person, the merger of both, opens the door to the visiting parents of Millie.

Speaking on the podcast on the toolbox of Indiewire’s filmmaker, Shanks explained that the mixture of bodies and the new character were obtained without the use of the AI. “The quantity of projections to which I went now, and people come to me and say to me:” Was it an AI at the end? ” It is so crazy that people assume that AI is now the cause. “As a VFX guy, as a person who has worked with all these teams who put so much work, it’s so frustrating now that people look at something that looks interesting or good, and they (assume) that a computer has done it. It is like” no, no, no. “”

Instead, the “tillie” character was created using the composer of the visual and visual effects of Geneviève Camilleri. “In pre-production, Gen is just mounted and took photos of Dave and Alison, then in Nuke, she made a lot of variations on the elements to be taken from which of their faces to understand what is essential to see them both in this final image,” said Shanks.

Then, during the day, the director shot the scene with the two actors. “After turning the scene with Alison, we moved to Dave, with a bunch of points on her face,” he continued. “Gen took his jaw and his lips and stuck this on the background (face). It is really a combination of makeup and, you would not call it CGI, because nothing is generated by computer, but it is by composing.”

Back up a bit from the details of TogetherIt is wild that Shanks must defend that his film did not use an AI genetive. If he had even released only 3-4 years ago, it would not even have been a thought. We would have all supposed that it was one of them by dressing like the other or visual effects. In the end, it’s a bit both. But the whole conversation has changed when we started living in a world where you can put “Dave Franco and Alison Brie as one person” in a program and recover something in a few seconds. Basically, from accessories to stems to do something good, work hard and make something memorable. And Boo in the world to make us forget that the real magic of cinema comes from the human touch.

Together is now in theaters.

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