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Behind the intimate supernatural body horror film starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie.

In Michael Shanks’ Together, one of the independent film’s most striking visual effects centers around ‘body morphing.’ The story’s central conceit—characters physically merging and transforming—demanded a highly technical approach that blended on-set planning with intricate digital artistry.

That becomes most apparent when on-screen (and real life) couple Millie (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco), having experienced this body morphing phenomenon by becoming literally stuck onto each other, eventually accept their fate and fully fuse. The shots would involve Brie and Franco performing as much of the scenes as possible, with CG take-overs then required to show the body parts ‘morphing’ together.

Overseeing that work and other VFX in the film was visual effects supervisor Genevieve Camilleri. The principal vendors were Framestore (visual effects supervisor Josh Simmonds), RISE FX (Camilleri was the VFX supervisor here), Basilic Fly Studio, Avatar Factory (scanning) and Kyle Ashley (previs). Director Michael Shanks and assistant editor Oliver Dear also personally contributed a significant number of visual effects shots, mostly involving clean-up.

Shanks’ script and storyboards helped inform Camilleri of what the director was looking for with the body morphing shots, which sees arms and limbs sliding under the skin, and even bones and body parts being pushed around. The merging also extends to an extreme eyeballs close-up that has perhaps become of the film’s signature images.

The body morphing shots were ultimately be realized by Framestore. For the look of these visual effects, Camilleri relates that Shanks was inspired by the skin shedding moments in the series Lovecraft Country, as well as some of the body horror scenes in the 2018 film Suspiria. “That film was great reference in terms of knowing what the feel was for the VFX. There’s this one scene where it’s two ladies in different rooms, but they are cut together and one’s doing an elegant, beautiful dance scene, and the other one is reacting to that and is getting ripped apart, with arms snapping and breaking.”

“That just really captured the feeling of what the director was after,” adds Camilleri. “It’s this really romantic, elegant thing, but at the same time, there’s this violent internal pain going on with it as well.”

To aid in the CG work that Framestore would be carrying out on the body morphing scenes, lead data wrangler Madi Sloan was responsible for acquiring on-set data. (Camilleri gives particular props to Sloan for her work—“The first day she came out on set, I was down with food poisoning, so she was there on her own. I was on the phone watching in, but she did an amazing job.”)

In addition, Avatar Factory (led by 3D scanning technicians Mark Ruff, Kate Ruff, Chloe Ruff and Amy Ruff) attended on set with their mobile scanning truck to acquire full body scans of the main actors, used principally for the intimate scene of the couple merging together while naked. “Alison and Dave were great in helping us out with that and participating,” notes Camilleri. “Obviously they were not fully clothed—they were naked for the whole day shooting that scene. I wanted to keep the scans as clean as possible as well to help Framestore out in making sure they didn’t have to do extra work if we had to have them clothed.”

The first major body morphing moment occurs when the pair find themselves drawn to each other in a hallway between bedrooms, and lock arms. On set, Camilleri discussed with Brie and Franco how they would mime the actions. “We talked about how what they would do would end up driving our animation under the skin. Dave and Alison did a really good job of acting out what they thought the internals would be doing with their hands and how it would all be joining. But it was a pretty clean, straightforward shoot. It was literally just them with their hands, some tracking markers on their arms, and away we went with it.”

Then, for the later signature body morphing moment, where the couple embrace naked, Camilleri requested a few different plates for each shot. “One of the plates involved Dave and Alison acting it out as we envisioned the animation to happen. Then we’d get them to do it more static, so keeping it still. That gave us more reference and clean skin, if we needed to use it. I also got them to pretend they had no hands, so they tucked their arms in next to each other and just acted with their bodies.”

Furthermore, prosthetics designer Larry Van Duynhoven provided a prosthetic build of Franco’s chest, specifically for moving skin reference. “We put that on a canvas with a hole in it,” describes Camilleri. “I could stick my hand in the back of it and then poke out my fingers through the skin. We shot plates of that on set in the correct lighting to get an idea of what the skin might look like when it was being poked out from internally.”

Framestore then took the live-action plates, scans and on-set reference into shot production for the body morphing. The team there crafted digital doubles of Franco and Brie, building in muscle, bone and skin layers. “We really wanted to have the internals be there,” advises Camilleri. “The idea was to feel it. It’s all heavy and it’s close, and they’re all being pushed up against each other. We didn’t want it to have that kind of hollow feel where the hands are just really moving around. There’d be sections that bulge out or the bones being under such pressure that they crack and stick out.”

Camilleri recognized early on that replicating the look of human skin, including sub-surface scattering, would be one of Framestore’s biggest challenges. “The main thing for me was just matching what we shot on set. I think the real lighting reference is always the best point to get it looking as believable as possible. Framestore also brought a little bit of their own flavor to creatively add more of that subsurface to it, especially in the hallway scene.”

And then, there was the eyeball shot. Here, Millie and Tim get so close together that their eyeballs merge into each other. “Again,” shares Camilleri, “Dave and Alison were just so cooperative and a dream to work with. We filmed a plate on set for that, and they just gave it their best shot of how close they could actually get their eyes together, and they got them pretty damn close!”

“I knew from the beginning that I always wanted to keep their real eyeballs as much as possible,” continues Camilleri. “I also wanted to keep as much of their faces as possible and really just replace the skin around their eyelids. Framestore was able to pretty much do that, they just had to re-project parts of the plate onto CG eyeballs. They did an amazing job keeping all those intricacies and details.”

Part of the connecting eyeball moment sees the pair’s eyelashes reaching out and acting almost like hooks. “The director wanted to have this sense that they were being pulled together,” says Camilleri. “At some point we saw an early test from Framestore and he said, ‘Oh, it’d be really cool if the eyelashes weaved in on each other through the skin. I think that shot is probably my favorite in the film.”

Camilleri then oversaw a set of visual effects shots as visual effects supervisor at RISE FX. These were largely tackled in 2D for budgetary reasons. “I did have to wear many hats on these,” notes Camilleri. “I was the VFX supervisor, comp supervisor and sometimes I comp’d some of the shots myself. But I really enjoyed it. It was just great problem solving. Normally you might have some 3D support, but we had to think outside the box by doing them in comp.”

For example, a dog that becomes the result of two search dogs merged together was one visual effect achieved in compositing. “We did shoot some prosthetics on set for it,” observes Camilleri. “But we were quite limited in what we could do with the dog and what we could attach to the dog so that it was not uncomfortable. We added a bit more blood, and we had to clean up some of the prosthetic seams, just to make it a bit more gruesome. Hats off to the artists at RISE. It was all tracked in comp—we didn’t have a 3D dog to track with or anything.”

RISE also handled a kissing scene between Tim and Millie in which their lips and skin fuse. “I comp’d that one myself,” says Camilleri. “I thought we could get away there with a morph dissolve in Nuke. I painted up a clean patch of the skin between them and then morph dissolved that between the original plate and the cleanup patch.”

Camilleri’s trickiest comp that she took on was for the film’s final shot. Millie’s parents arrive at the door and are greeted by someone who looks a little like their daughter, but is in fact the fused together Millie and Tim. The shot was the result of filming an ‘A’ plate of Brie in hair and make-up at the front door, then a ‘B’ plate of Franco, and combining the two in comp.

Some early tests were carried out in pre-production. “I actually grabbed a couple of images on the internet of Dave and Alison,” outlines Camilleri. “I took some features of theirs to see what kind of person we could come up with. It looked pretty hideous, the first test that I did, but it was just two images I had found and the perspectives were a little off. So then I realized we needed to do some more heavy lifting testing on this to make sure it was going to work.”

“So,” adds Camilleri, “we had Dave and Alison on set, and I got them to shoot a plate of Alison standing there saying, ‘Hey’. And then the same thing with Dave. I’d also figured we couldn’t have any crazy camera moves going on with the final shot because I knew we didn’t have the budget to put this into a 3D environment. I did a mock-up, taking bits of Dave and putting those onto Alison. I realized afterwards that we could probably get 70% of the way there on set just with make-up, and even shoulder pads for Alison to lift her shoulders up higher and wider. Dave also has some pretty unique eyebrows so we had some made for Alison, and also had her wear contact lenses to match Dave’s eye color.”

On the day of the actual shoot, Camilleri had to pivot slightly on the original plans. Firstly, the scene became a relatively lengthy Steadicam shot, following the parents from their car to the front door. It was also one in which plates of Brie and Franco could not be filmed straight after one another. “We needed Dave to be clean shaven since we didn’t want any facial hair, but production needed him with stubble for another scene. That meant we had to shoot him another day and re-create the lighting for when we shot Alison, but we did get it pretty close.”

Franco’s shoot required him to match as closely as possible the ‘Hey’ that Brie had already performed on the ‘A’ plate. “Dave was amazing,” marvels Camilleri. “We showed him the previous take of Alison for the timing of saying the word. He watched it maybe twice and then he almost exactly nailed the mouth opening on his takes.”

At RISE, Camilleri embarked on the composite of Tim and Millie (affectionately dubbed ‘Tillie’). Interestingly, Camilleri did not consider that the fused Tillie could be a shot achieved with some kind of machine learning face swap—“I knew it would be quicker and easier to do with traditional compositing,” she says. “We also didn’t know what an AI person might end up coming out like.”

Camilleri therefore utilized Nuke to mix between the Brie and Franco plates. “I always knew it would be Dave’s nose and mouth that we would transfer across. We also then widened Alison’s jaw and neck through a bit of warping, and raised her shoulders a little. Alison has quite unique big eyes and Dave’s got a lot smaller eyes, so we shrunk the eyes down to make it in between the two characters.”

“That shot was probably the shot I was the most worried about,” admits Camilleri. “I knew it was the final shot. It was the image everyone’s leaving with on the film. But I was really glad with how it came out.”

Persons: Dave Franco, Alison Brie, Michael Shanks, Josh Simmonds, Genevieve Camilleri, Oliver Dear
Company Names: Framestore, RISE FX, Basilic Fly Studio, Avatar Factory
Titles: Together, Lovecraft Country, Suspiria

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