In March of 2023, I met with Thunder Road, and during the initial meeting, they asked if I might be interested in taking over VFX Supervision duties on a film they had recently completed principal photography on – “Breathe“, directed by Stefon Bristol, and starring Jennifer Hudson, Milla Jovovich, Quvenzhané Wallis, and Sam Worthington.
This movie is set in Brooklyn, New York in the year 2039. In this world, due to the ravages of man-made climate change, the oxygen has vanished from Earth’s atmosphere, and the oceans have evaporated. All that remains is a desert wasteland, devoid of life, where all oxygen-dependent life forms have gone extinct. All, except for a very clever family, who have figured out a way to produce oxygen, grow food, and survive inside a heavily-fortified former nursery in Bushwick.
The movie was entirely shot in Pennsylvania. Exteriors were filmed in a neighborhood in Chester, PA; interiors on a sound stage, and a few additional exteriors were shot in downtown Philadelphia.
The VFX challenge here was to take the exterior photography and realistically set it in a post-apocalyptic, desiccated New York. Special care had to be taken to ensure that no green plant life was visible anywhere. In addition, we had to fully consider how the built environment would react to an atmosphere devoid of oxygen and moisture. Metal would not rust, and concrete would rapidly lose its structural integrity, as two examples.
In order to bring our director’s vision to life, I turned to the following creative partners:
- Brainstorm Digital – exterior environments, NYC
- Nexodus – exterior environments, Philadelphia
- Cabin Editorial – motion graphics
- Nick Onstad & Jon Sadonsky – in-house compositors
We were able to complete a total of 394 visual effects shots in a period of 10 weeks. These included construction of 7 distinct all-CG environments; 6 NYC environments were done by Brainstorm, and the Philadelphia exteriors were done by Nexodus.
I couldn’t be more proud of the work that we were able to pull off on this project. The environments that we built really contributed to the sense of isolation and dread that the heroes in our story felt. Principal photography did not take place in many exterior locations, and the VFX in this film really fleshed out the world that Stefon Bristol was trying to build.
As a parting gift, Mr. Bristol was kind enough to reward me with a main-on-end credit on his film – my very first! It looks good here coming from the Avid, but it looked even better seeing it on the big screen in April of this year!
