How ‘Severance' creates Lumon's ‘manufactured perfection' through VFX

Yahoo

13 hours ago

As sci-fi TV shows go, Severance certainly seems lighter on special effects than the likes of Andor. There are no alien planets or laser guns to be had here, after all — but the 'manufactured perfection' of Severance still takes a lot of work. Lumon Industries is determined to shape the world according to the corporate ethos of Kier Eagan, and putting that world on screen requires a variety of techniques. In a new interview with Gold Derby, Severance VFX supervisor Eric Leven of Industrial Light & Magic explains how various aspects of Season 2 were constructed. Alongside his commentary, you can watch the finished shots in the reel below.
Severance has constructed massive sets for the labyrinthine white hallways of Lumon's office. But filming Season 2's dramatic opening scene, in which Mark S. (Adam Scott) runs paranoid through seemingly endless corridors in a single camera shot, required more than what the production could physically build.
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'Ben [Stiller] really likes to shoot as much practically as possible, he wants to have as much reality as possible, but particularly for that opening scene, there was just no way to do that,' Leven says. 'So even for the very first shot, where they had envisioned this very precise mechanical movement around Mark's head so it makes this 540-degree circle and then moves out of the elevator and then swings all over the lobby and then runs down the hallways, there was no way to shoot that practically. There is no camera setup that can make that happen. So we started combining a bunch of different techniques, one of which was this big giant robot motion-controlled camera.'
But a camera that size couldn't fit in the Lumon elevator, so then Leven's team had to figure out how to create a digital version of the elevator to make it work. Ultimately, that opening sequence involved a combination of real sets and CGI environments, blended together to look seamless — a process that took nearly six months to complete. 'There's a part where we're pushing with Mark, and then we do this 180 around him,' Leven says. 'What became the most feasible was, let's put him on a treadmill and build a CG environment around him. So he was running through real hallways for part of this shot, but the trick was, even with these endless stages, there's only so much he can actually run through. So we did have to do a bunch of stitches.
"Ben was really adamant that audiences are more sophisticated now, they can see these stitches. We wanted to make sure to avoid that. We basically shuffled the deck and made new techniques. So for example, when Mark goes around a corner, you would think that normally that corner wall would be the stitch point, but we would back in to, say, his ankle so that if you watch really carefully, you'd see his foot never leaves the frame. And this keeps the audience guessing."
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The Bell Labs complex in New Jersey stands in for Lumon's office building where Mark S. and his fellow innies report to work every day. But as anyone who attended the Severance event at Bell Labs back in April knows, there's still a big difference between our real world and Lumon. Leven and his team help create that difference.
'It was important for Ben to be on a real location that the actors can react to,' Leven says. 'But we want to make this place look isolated in the middle of nowhere, so we're getting rid of other houses, we're changing the trees. Everything has to be perfect, precise, and symmetrical. So we're changing the layout of some of the roadways and the surrounding environment. We're adding period cars, because Severance takes place in this nebulous world where, for some reason, a lot of the cars are from the '80s.'
Leven credits Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle with the idea for the '80s cars. It's an aesthetic that Hindle personally likes, which also helps distinguish Severance's world. Meanwhile, the specific layout of the Bell Labs building posed its own problem.
'What's really interesting about the Bell Labs building is that it was the first building ever built with a mirrored exterior, the first mirrored building,' Leven says. 'So when the camera is looking away from Bell Labs in the parking lot, we obviously have a lot of work to do, like I said: Making the symmetrical roadways, making everything perfect, adding all these cars, changing the trees. But then, when you point the camera towards the building, you may think it's practical and we don't have to change anything in visual effects, but because there's a big giant mirror, we are now reflecting all of this stuff that also needs to be changed. So now we're adding the reflection of the period cars, the reflection of the symmetrical roadway. Just about every shot is, if not completely digital, almost 80 percent replaced in CG.'
Special effects work best when they are a vehicle for storytelling, and all this work by Leven and his team does have a resonance with the show's big themes. It takes a lot of work to make things seem so perfect. Lumon often appears to have total control over their severed employees, but the past two seasons have shown that such control takes a lot of work, and can break down easily.
'It's a manufactured perfection that is never really achievable,' Leven says. 'That is one of the things Lumon is trying to do, but it feels like whenever mankind tries to do that, it always backfires.'
Hindle also told Leven that one of his big aesthetic touchpoints for Severance, in addition to '80s cars, was a shot from the Joel and Ethan Coen's film Fargo, where a character is alone in a big wintry field, surrounded by snow that makes them seem like a small, insignificant speck. That's what Severance creatives want Lumon employees to feel like. Unfortunately, snow is hard to control. 'That's where a lot of that idea that there should be this constant snowfall comes from, and they schedule the shoot to happen in the winter,' Leven says. 'They're shooting in New York, they go to places like upstate New York and Newfoundland, and then the weather does what it does, and frequently it just doesn't snow. Or if it does snow, it's not enough snow or it snows and immediately melts the next day or whatever.'
Once again, reality must be massaged by the magic of VFX in order to give Severance the required look of endless winter.
'There's a constant visual effects presence to make this snow a character throughout the series,' Leven says. 'Because Ben likes to shoot as much real as possible, we try to have some practical snow on set, but even when they have these big piles of snow that they shovel into the location, that snow is too chunky or it's not the right shape or not the right design. So even the practical snow is changed by visual effects to give the perfection of Lumon and the town of Kier. Everything has to be just so.'
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One of the most dramatic moments in the Severance Season 2 finale comes when Mr. Milchick (Tramell Tillman) summons a marching band to MDR to celebrate Mark's achievement with the 'Cold Harbor' project. As you might expect, the band was mostly cast with real actors in costumes — but VFX helped swell their ranks. 'They had a band there, and they really wanted the band to crowd MDR,' Leven syas. 'But MDR is a really big space, so it was like, how many band members can we get? Because every additional band member is another costume and another instrument. So they got a certain number of band members, but then it was like, well, this area feels a little bit empty over here. Can you fill that in with extra band members? So we would do some of that. We'd fill in with extra band members where it felt a little empty.'
But the biggest challenge of this sequence was the overhead shot where the band members hold up cards forming Mark's face and 100 percent completion of Cold Harbor.
'Ben and I thought, we really need to do this as practically as possible,' Leven says. 'The issue was that the real MDR set has a ceiling, and you just couldn't get a camera high enough to get that shot. So we actually had to shoot that one shot on a different stage, on a different day, with the whole band. But even then, the camera could only get so high. I think we only saw maybe 16 or 18 band members in the practical high shot. So then we were adding all the additional band members digitally, adding CG walls of MDR, and then all of the cards are CG. It was a really great use of having that practical base to work from.'
Watch Gold Derby's exclusive roundtable with the cast and creators of Severance:
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