Since starting out at Scanline VFX in 2004, Michael Ralla has worked across a range of top-tier studios, including Framestore and Marvel Studios. His credits span major productions like The Avengers, Ender’s Game, Christopher Robin, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Since launching his career at The Mill in 2001, James Alexander has contributed to numerous high-profile projects at top studios like Framestore. His credits include Skyfall, WandaVision, and The Marvels.
What is your background?
Michael: Great question! I was the overall VFX Supervisor at Warner Brothers on Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners. On paper, I am an Audiovisual Engineer – whatever that means. I started at Scanline in Munich in 2004, left Germany in 2007 and worked in Sydney, Australia for several years, spent almost a year at Framestore in London and MPC in Vancouver. Since end of 2010 I have been living in Los Angeles and San Francisco, working at ILM, Digital Domain as well as Framestore and went independent/’studio-side’ in 2022. Initially, I wanted to be a sound engineer – but when I saw a short film called 405 that was all made by two guys in their basement with regular home PC’s, I pivoted…that was just too cool!
James: I couldn’t get enough of movies as a kid. The way they transported me was just magic. And the special and visual effects were what grabbed me most. From ED-209 in Robocop (watched way too young :)) to the Hoth battle in The Empire Strikes Back, to the creature transformation in An American Werewolf In London, I loved how these moments pulled me deeper into the worlds of these films. I studied film at university and my first job in the business was as a runner at The Mill in London in 2001, right after they had won the VFX Oscar for Gladiator and where I got my first experience of producing, working on music videos and commercials. My time in London led me to Framestore and then to the Framestore LA office where on my first day I met the inimitable Michael Ralla.
How did you get involved on this film?
Michael: I heard some inklings about Ryan’s new film end of February 2024, got a phone call in early March and spoke with Ryan, Zinzi and Sev [Ryan’s producer – and the founders of “Proximity”, Ryan’s production company) and later the good folks at WB about coming on board for this film. Mid-March James and I both flew to New Orleans to hit the ground running…
James: Michael cornered me at the bar of the Beverley Hilton during the VES Awards 2024! We had been trying to find a way to work together since we had both left Framestore on separate but parallel paths and spent years working on productions at Marvel. Michael had worked with Ryan on Wakanda Forever and he let me know that a new film was imminent. The prospect of working with Ryan and Ralla was all the enticement I needed. Once I learned more about the show – the music, the horror, the cast and crew, the challenges for VFX – it’s hard to imagine a show that could have wanted to work on more.
How did you choose the various vendors and split the work amongst them?
Michael: We’re both pretty particular when it comes to choosing who we work with – and we are also trying to actively move away from the word ‘vendor’. We were looking for creative partners on this show, who would be active and engaged stakeholders in the making of this film, and who, in return, would also get to significantly contribute creatively and really take ownership of what they were doing.
First and foremost, this is all about personal relationships with supervisors and producers who we know and have worked with before. This was initially not a VFX-heavy or “-driven” movie (even though it would not have been possible to tell the story of MBJ playing twins as effectively without VFX), so we were looking for mid-size companies, versus being a smaller fish in the big pond at the usual suspects of big size companies. Second, and this is very important in terms of protecting quality as well as budget: We were trying to stay outside of the typical tax-break hubs. Companies not reliant on Hollywood work in areas with a truly local and somewhat independent film industry seemed to have weathered the last years with strikes etc. significantly better, which not only gives them a grown and loyal artist base, but especially the ability to do a lot with challenging budgets and. Low overhead, flat hierarchy and dynamic maneuvering if a pivot is needed (which we were trying to avoid as much as possible).
For all of the above reasons, we chose Storm Studios in Norway with Espen Nordahl at the helm as our biggest partner, followed by Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) in Adelaide with Guido Wolters, and a small killer-team at ILM in Vancouver, led by Nick Marshall. Later, Outpost VFX in Bournemouth with VFX Supervisor Ian Fellows came on board, followed by Base FX in Beijing and VFX Supervisor Jared Sandrew as well as Light VFX in Paris, with VFX Supervisor Antoine Moulineau. Our previz/postviz partner was Baraboom Studios in Los Angeles, from where Visualisation Supervisor Pepe Valencia was supervising a team all over Spain. Lastly, we had an amazing team of in-house compositors… even though none of them was truly in-house.
James: It’s hard to overstate how totally crucial the casting of creative partners is for a show. There has to be a great personal connection between supervisors and producers. This often comes from established relationships but on every production we look to build new bonds too. A huge part of the collaboration is ownership and engagement. We need to find partners who are as invested in the work as we are, and that brings in loads of variables like the size of the companies we work with, what they specialize in, who is available, what work they enjoy, and on and on. Michael and I from our time working at VFX houses definitely appreciate how valuable it is to be integrated and involved in a studio production as much as possible. We work hard to engage our partners as early as we can, to be on equal footing as we plan our approach, and wherever possible have those teams on set with us.
Michael, James, could you tell us about your collaboration with director Ryan Coogler on Sinners?
Michael: Collaboration is THE defining aspect of working with Ryan Coogler. Ryan is casting his team behind the camera the same way he casts people in front of it. He puts a lot of thought into choosing his collaborators, and as a result, many of his crew have been working with him for years. If you become a department head on one of his projects, you know he really trusts you. He doesn’t make movies with a bunch of people, he makes movies with his friends and becoming a department head on one of his projects means he really trusts you. His mantra is, “I’m not hiring the best people to tell them what to do. I want them to tell me what they think is best and elevate the movie with their skills. The best that can happen is that they switch from talking about working on Ryan’s movie, to working on OUR movie.” Almost every day during prep started with a catch-up between Ryan and his HOD’s, the same during the shoot, and all the way into post with a weekly state-of the-union meeting until the film was released.
James: Ryan is really trusting of his crew and HODs. He counts on the team he creates to bring him the creative solutions that are going to help him realise his vision for the film. He’s also generous with his time and attention. When he’s reviewing or discussing the work he’s locked in and thoughtful and thorough with his feedback and notes.
What was his vision for the VFX, and how did you bring that vision to life?
Michael: Both of us, James and I, had extensively talked about the look and feel of the VFX work on “Sinners”, especially with Ryan and Autumn, the DP. All of us have experience working on massive Marvel blockbusters, and to me, it was clear upon reading the script that we’d have at least 750 VFX shots, with more being added as we go – despite an early notion of keeping the shot count around 250, with a desire to bring that number down.
While the film is definitely narratively dependent on (invisible) VFX for the twinning, it is not a classic VFX driven feature where we create spectacle to draw audiences into the theater. Our work had to be subtle, tactile and intricate, and we looked at a lot of references together with Autumn, not only for VFX but also overall for the movie. We were trying to create a theme, instead of just individual tasks, and define the bigger picture. For VFX, our theme was being timeless, creating work that will stand the test of time and still look good in 20 years – exactly like some of the references that Ryan brought up to use, like Terminator 2 for Fight Club. Movies from the 90s, with VFX that still tell the story and not pull you out of the movie.
During principal photography, we would always shoot something in-camera, no matter what, so VFX would never start with a completely empty frame – even if the photography was only used as references, or to extract the camera move. Everyone these days is trying to shoot as much as possible practical and in camera, and while we embraced all of that, we also tried to go beyond that by creating significant overlap between what was done practically and digitally – with the simple idea of creating a cohesive look that fits the theme. The best way to do that is via interdepartmental collaboration, and to become best friends with camera-, wardrobe-, art-, SFX-, Makeup-, SFX Makeup- and stunt-department.
A really good example is one of the special effects make-up looks that Mike Fontaine put together for Remmick’s death moment, just before he lights up in flames: We designed together what happens when and where, with the VFX dept providing initial concepts, and then married those moments to certain script beats. Mike ended up designing several, highly complex make-up looks. Some of them we never shot with the motion picture camera – they were explicitly meant to be scanned only, so we could create digital replicas as in-between phases of the vampire’s demise progression. We were actively trying to preserve creative intent from pre- all the way into postproduction, and for that reason, we wanted to have Mike design every aspect of that.
Once we spoke with Marvin Williams, our 1st AD, about the schedule, it became crystal clear we would not be able to shoot all the different transitional stages Remmick was going through with the current schedule and the required MU turnover times. Having the VFX scanned intermediate looks was important to recreate digital make up versions faithfully to his creative ideas and make everything look cohesive – so all phases come from the same creative mastermind. Seamlessness is not just good lighting and compositing, it’s also about what’s in front of the camera. Just because we can do it all in our VFX bubble in post doesn’t mean we always should. It is the collaboration that gives the work heart and soul.
James: This is a picture where the visual effects truly support the story and the craft in front of the camera. Ralla and I have worked on many projects where the VFX team needs to create something from nothing – often magical or fantastical effects. Sinners offered a wonderful counterpoint to that where all of our work had to be fundamentally grounded in the reality of the story. Working with celluloid was the starting point with painstaking attention needed to integrate the digital work with the analogue look, with exhaustive diagnosis and mapping of our DOP Autumn’s lenses. From there we set out to honor the quality of the production design, costumes, make up, cinematography, the music – visual effects played a role in supporting all of these departments and the world of Sinners overall. Everything we created was from photographic reference and collaboration with other departments. When the roof of the Juke burns in The Surreal Montage we did that for real – and used the plate to inform the digital recreation. Remmick’s Death is anchored to the incredible work of Mike Fontaine’s SFX make up. We filmed puppeteered blistering and bubbling skin which was used as an element in the vampire deaths. The majority of the work had to be invisible, and never distract the audience from the characters and story.
Michael B. Jordan plays twins in this film, with a lot of interactions between the characters. How did you approach the VFX work to make these scenes as seamless and convincing as possible?
Michael: To make the twin interactions seamless, we began with one principle: capture Michael B. Jordan’s performance with the highest possible fidelity every single time – live, in the moment, under real lighting, without slowing the shoot down – preserving momentum. Everything flowed from that. We engineered the HALO rig as a lightweight, actor-worn multi-camera array that preserved every nuance of Michael’s facial motion and head movement while keeping him completely free to perform. The rig was built to fulfill the baseline technical requirements Rising Sun Pictures needed, while also giving them far richer, higher-quality data than they had originally anticipated. We did an initial twin-test shoot around six weeks before the start of principal photography (66 days in New Orleans), not only to test the different methodologies and capture test footage and data for VFX tests, but also to walk through the different twin methodologies together with the crew, Ryan and Michael. I am a huge fan of “Pepsi Challenges”, where we compare the results from approaches – ideally with identical output, in the best case. We learned quickly how important it was to shoot two real passes of full-body Michael for slower, wider shots, as he had put a lof of work into the character development and mannerisms of the two twins that we just had to see him perform for real – no matter how difficult it would be to composite the interactions between them… the cigarette handover is a good example for that; we establish them both for the first time, it had to be full body Michael. The other thing we learned is that we could not. RSP then adapted and expanded their workflow, incorporating a Gaussian-Avatar component to make the most of the HALO capture, massively upgrading their head replacement- workflow to hold up to the scrutiny of an IMAX-level projection.
James: In pre-production we worked to understand how Ryan wanted each shot to play out. How would he shoot if the twins were played by two different actors? We never wanted the VFX approach to dictate or constrain Ryan’s approach. Once we understood what he envisioned, we could tailor our approach to fit.
What were some of the challenges you faced while creating the interactions between Michael B. Jordan’s twins, especially in scenes where they’re facing each other?
Michael: We did not create any interactions, they were all real and filmed in-camera – either with Michael himself, for instance like the Cigarette-handover, which was probably the hardest shot in the movie to film – or by using his body- or stunt-double. I can’t reiterate enough how performance driven this film was, and for the twinning, this all came from no one else but Michael B. Jordan. Our mandate was to ALWAYS stay 100% true to that… no matter what, it had to be Michael’s performance. We did never alter or synthesize any of it – it always him, purely!
James: Our research of Twinning methodologies was super interesting. As a visual effect Twinning stretches back practically to the dawn of cinema, with Georges Méliès using split screens to place multiple heads of the same character in frame, way back in 1898. You can then trace the technological advancements and increased sophistication through many iconic films – The Parent Trap, Dead Ringers, Moon, The Social Network – bringing us right up to date with the very latest tools available today. Absolutely critical to the process was that the VFX approach never constrained or dictated how Ryan and Autumn shot the film. We worked with them to understand how they would stage a shot if the twins were played by separate actors, and then tailored the VFX approach to fit, so the filmmaking was never compromised.
The film takes place in the 1930s in the southern United States. Can you walk us through the process of recreating this historical period from a VFX perspective?
Michael: Honestly, most of the heavy lifting for period accuracy was done by Hannah Beachler’s art department team – what they were able to do was nothing short of amazing. The same goes for costumes & wardrobe. With James and I being both originally from Europe and of caucasian descent, we learned a lot about African American history, especially from talking to costume designer Ruth Carter. The grocery store was shot on location in Thibodaux, LA and the art department basically dressed the entire street to look like Clarksdale, MS. We removed tons of cables, reflections and non-period accurate things, but only added set extensions on both tail ends of the streets, everything else truly was in camera. The one huge exception to that was the train station – production could simply not find a period-accurate train station in Louisiana, let alone an actual train with steam engine and Pullman carriages. That’s when it got interesting for us – especially because Hannah had already done a significant amount of research that she was able to hand over, and guide us with. Again, preservation of creative intent was important to us, we concepted different looks and layouts for the digital portion of the train station as well as the train, which ended up being the majority of the frame in some shots – but always asked for her input and approval. The idea was to have her design anything that’s virtual the same way she designed the actual builds on the day, so everything has the same visual language.
Were there specific references you used to ensure historical accuracy in the VFX work?
Michael: Clarksdale in Mississippi was a huge reference, again, in particular for the train station – where ILM did in fact create a massive digital set extension. We approached it the same way as everything else, we put together some basic blocking concepts as a starting point and then roped in Hannah Beachler to give feedback. As I said before, just because we can essentially create things like that fully on our own, doesn’t mean that we should. If Hannah would have been able to build a full train station set, time and money permitting, she probably would have done that – so we wanted to give her the opportunity to complete her job digitally. Once her design was complete, we turned it all over to Nick Marshall and his team at ILM. It was important to us to keep feedback loops as short as possible and significantly the typical amount of waste in the VFX production process, which is why we kept that process in house. Nick and his team then recreated the entire station in 3D, using 3dsmax and vray, including a fully digital train. For the latter we scanned an existing train and the famous Pullman carriages that ILM then recreated digitally and refreshed with a matching 1930s look.
James: This relates more directly to the rural scenes but something that was so helpful in understanding Ryan’s vision for Sinners was hearing him talk about his experience of the Mississippi Delta and specifically the unique horizons of that environment. Being a Delta it is of course incredibly flat, and Ryan described the sense of isolation that comes from being able to see so far into the distance. Even though the space is enormous, the fact that you can see so far into an empty landscape reinforces how alone a person can be within it. That explanation so clearly conveyed the tone of those scenes for me and was a wonderful piece of direction.
Many sequences feature cars passing through cotton fields. How did you create the look of these fields and integrate them with the cars and the environment to make it feel both realistic and cinematic?
Michael: For the cotton-field work, every driving shot was captured for real with hard-mounted cameras or a process trailer. No bluescreen, no poor-man’s process, which meant extensive roto but this gave us authentic interaction, dust, and vibration to anchor the VFX. At Storm Studios, Espen Nordahl’s team built a fully procedural Houdini system to transform the sweet-corn plates into Ryan’s emotionally charged “sea of white” cotton: millions of plants generated with species-accurate variation, wind-responsive motion, boll and leaf behavior, and a seed-drift system that allowed the fields to “breathe” naturally in wide shots. They could dial areas to look fresh, dense, or “plucked,” and even thread in photographic sharecropper sprites between the rows for visual and historical texture. A key mandate was the table-flat horizon Ryan wanted, Louisiana’s natural terrain and tree lines prevented this, so Storm rebuilt the ground plane and skyline to achieve that infinite openness. Base FX, under Jared Sandrew, then applied this look and toolset to hundreds of shots, extending or replacing fields and integrating the cars seamlessly into the digital landscape. The result is entirely grounded in real photography yet delivers the vast, emotionally loaded cotton fields the story required.
James: The set was dressed with up to 50 practical plants that were placed closest to camera and gave us a reference to match for the extensions we created. The crops that filled the fields that we filmed were in fact sugar cane so all of that needed to be replaced. Again this is an example of the environment helping tell the story. Espen and the team at Storm in Oslo created areas of the fields that have been picked of the puffy white cotton as the workers move through their rows. The crop outside Joan and Bert’s farmhouse is in worse condition than elsewhere in the film as their land is not so well maintained.
There’s an incredible musical oner in the film. Was it a single shot, or did you use hidden cuts to make it flow seamlessly? What were the technical and creative challenges of combining visual effects with choreography in such a complex and fluid oner?
Michael: The shot you are referring to is what we called “the surreal montage”. It was the one sequence that Ludwig (Goransson, composer) and Autumn (Durald) were both talking about early on, how emotional they felt when reading the script and to what degree the lines jumped off the page. It is a shot with almost 5000 frames, 3mins and 20s long, comprising of 5 different sections, and it took months of planning. From the start, it was clear that this shot had to be an IMAX moment, as Ryan wanted to fully immerse the audience in the juke joint party. It all started with a blueprint of the Juke Joint set Hannah Beachler built at second line studios, and Autumn started sketching in semi-concentric camera swerves using storyboards from Louis as key frames, while Ryan was going through a list of all the characters Ruth Carter was dressing and placing them in the juke joint. We filmed all of that, and sent it to our Previz team at Baraboom and they started putting it all together – at that point still without music. I was on a flight back to LA when we got the first pass of the music for this scene, and put it all together using a big hoodie as privacy shield… the goosebumps were almost immediate when I hit play. A couple days later we found ourselves “all in sweatpants” as our producer Sev is always saying, doing a first rehearsal with Renard Cheren, the steady cam operator, in an empty soundstage with to-scale outlines taped on the floor going through the whole sequence while Luwig was essentially live-composing, adjusting the score in realtime to Ryan’s directions while Akoman Jones was designing a choreography . We repeated that process inside the lumber mill set once Hannah’s team completed the build. The sequence kept growing, as Ryan always wants the camera movement to be motivated by a person, who is taking us from one place to the next without making it too perfectly staged or choreographed, the camera needed to be fluid and organic, but should never motivate any performances. We knew we had to shoot it all in sections, as the smaller IMAX magazines compatible with Steadycam use could only roll for 75s, and we were trying to utilize naturally hard lines in the architecture as stitch points for the sections of the sequence instead of using the typical full screen wipes with people blocking the frame for a a few frames that most people would look for. That in itself added another level of complexity, and we were rehearsing those transition sections very carefully with the Steadycam operator, so speed, position and overall timing would match, and also introduced overlap between two sections.
Could you share how the VFX were integrated into this sequence?
Michael: Out of the five sections of the shot, one became an extremely VFX heavy endeavor – the moment the camera tilts up and the roof is on fire. Everything else is (more or less, or rather: hopefully) completely invisible VFX work, seamlessly stitching takes together, tons of clean up and overall adding more dancers that were shot as bluescreen sprite elements on a digital camera to each section. From our earliest conversations, Ryan always wanted the climax of Sammy’s performance to be the turning point of the story – it was the climatic peak of the juke joint part, but also the moment that attracts and reveals the vampires for the very first time.
That whole sequence had the most cross-media references, starting with Ernie Barne’s “The Sugar Shack” painting, over “The Roof Is on Fire” by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three all the way to “Skyfall”’s burning castle glow. The burning roof also became the climatic finale of principal photography – when the SFX department under Donnie Deans’ supervision set the roof of the Juke Joint set on Stage 4 at Second Line studios on fire, which we filmed with all IMAX cameras rolling. Storm Studios in Norway were tasked with bringing it all together, and they did a brilliant job of compositing all elements, until Ryan wanted to make the moment more emotional, follow the embers through the burning hole of the roof and have them dissipated into an insanely clear starry sky, to spend an ancestral moment looking at a clear sky. With that request, that whole moment became full-CG, carefully matched to the IMAX footage – and later used by IMAX as an advert.
What was your approach to designing and animating the vampires, especially in scenes where their physicality and movements were crucial to the horror element?
Michael: The most obvious signature element for anyone who got turned into a vampire is the look of the eyes- besides being bloodthirsty, drooling, sexy and needing invites into other peoples houses. Ryan had mentioned “tapetum lucidum”, which is a reflective layer behind the retina in many animals’ eyes that enhances night vision by bouncing light back through the retina, increasing the light available to photoreceptors. Mike Fontaine managed to recreate a very similar look with practical contact lenses, and the results were phenomenal… but not always practical to shoot with, and we also did not have lenses for every single person. We did a material ingest scan, and created digital replicas for a lot of shots – but always tried to have at least one pair in the shot that was real!
The final death of the vampire leader is one of the most memorable moments in the film, especially with how he burns. How did you approach this scene from a VFX standpoint to make the death both visually spectacular and emotionally impactful?
Michael: We approached Remmick’s death as a layered FX and performance sequence, built from as much photographed reality as safety allowed. Mike Fontaine’s SFX makeup team created multiple burn stages—early blistering, collapsed tissue, charred “crunchy” forms—which we could only shoot one or two per night because the applications took hours. We filmed the stages we could, 3D-scanned all of them, and used the scans to interpolate the missing ones so the progression stayed continuous and physically coherent. Andy Gill’s stunt team contributed a full-body stunt burn in a silicone suit, giving us real flame-wrap, heat distortion, and exposure reference, even though much of the fire was replaced later in CG; it grounded all our digital fire in real-world physics. Donnie Dean’s SFX department then built a practical fire-tornado rig, inspired by a Slow Mo Guys reference—flame spinning inside a water basin—so we could shoot actual rotating fire columns that we later combined with simulation-driven flames. At Storm VFX, Espen Nordahl’s team extended and rebuilt the Mississippi environment plate-by-plate, using a Houdini wave-pattern reader to match the swamp water motion seamlessly and adjusting the dawn/sunrise continuity shot-by-shot to track the story beat where the rising sun finally kills Remmick and cascades to the entire vampire horde. Because the scene was shot over multiple nights, the lighting rarely matched what the story required, so Storm did substantial digital relighting work, integrating bounce, rim, and shadow interaction to reflect Remmick’s escalating burn state and the vampires’ shared reaction to his death. The emotional impact comes from the fact that every visual layer—makeup, fire, lighting, and environment—was built on photographed truth and then digitally pushed to the exact dramatic beat the story needed.
What was the process like for creating the burning effect? Were there any unique challenges in making the flames and the transformation feel as intense and real as possible?
Michael: Creating Remmick’s burning required a hybrid practical–digital workflow designed to maintain realism all the way through IMAX projection. The process began with Fontaine’s multi-phase prosthetic progression, which we filmed partially and scanned entirely; those high-resolution scans allowed us to animate the transformation in controlled increments—silver-burn heat from the resonator guitar, then the wound from Smoke’s stake, and finally the lethal impact of the sun—without being limited to what we could shoot on the night. Once the progression reached the heavily charred stage, we switched to a body double in full “crunchy” prosthetics for mobility and continuity. To capture real fire interaction, Andy Gill’s team staged a stunt burn in a silicone suit, giving us crucial reference for flame speed, turbulence, temperature falloff, and how fire hugs fabric and anatomy. Donnie Dean’s SFX team generated a library of practical fire-tornado elements, tuned over many iterations, which gave us real-world air entrainment, ember lift, and rotational flow patterns we could blend 1:1 with CG pyro. Storm VFX then took all of that into a demanding post pipeline: extensive body rotomation for accurate light/shadow interplay on Remmick and the surrounding vampires; large-scale digital fire simulations matched to the practical elements; and major environment relighting, because shooting thirty actors on fire at night in the Louisiana swamp was impossible. Every shot needed precise CG illumination to reflect Remmick’s escalating burn and the horde’s synchronized reaction to his death. On top of that, Storm’s Houdini tools maintained a seamless water integration for the swamp, and they rebuilt the sky and terrain to maintain the dramatic sunrise progression across the edit. The realism comes from that continual handshake: real fire and real prosthetics for texture and reference, matched with digital flames and relighting for safety, control, and emotional timing.
Were there any memorable moments or scenes from the film that you found particularly rewarding or challenging to work on from a visual effects standpoint?
Michael: Yes, several come to my mind: The cigarette handover, first and foremost. We approached that as a multipass comp using a fully repeatable Technodolly rig – which, stills, is probably the hardest possible way we could have chosen, especially after Ryan turned it into a continuous shot with seven exchanges. I was dreading that day on the schedule, as I knew how long it could potentially take… but everyone delivered their A-game that day: There was lot of coordination between the different departments needed to make it all happen, lots of syncing of all sorts, but Michael was doing the real heavy lifting – and it was impressive how well he memorized every little movement and timing details. A lot of the twinning being successful goes back to his efforts.
The other really memorable moment was shooting the IMAX.
Looking back on the project, what aspects of the visual effects are you most proud of?
Michael: This is something we sometimes talked about jokingly: That this film doesn’t have any visual effects. At least to the public eye. We tried to keep the base level quality as high as possible, as it is almost always the weakest, and not necessarily the best or greatest shot, that the VFX quality is judged by. Timelessness was the ultimate goal- if someone watches this film in 25yrs and still doesn’t notice the VFX work, we have succeeded. Especially for the twinning shots, this was absolutely crucial – and the best possible feedback we received after some of the test screenings was that audiences commented on Smoke and Stack as two completely different people. Again, kudos to MBJ and his truly groundbreaking character development and -performances, which made our work significantly more successful, but at the same time – every single twin moment is a VFX shot. If I had to single out one shot, it is the twin establishing shot with the cigarette handover. I remember telling Ryan that this was the most important shot of the entire movie, if we manage to get that one right people will buy the characters for the rest of the movie. We shot it for real, with two passes and a lot of practice and fine tuning, and it was 100% worth it the countless takes. It’s the shot we wanted all our peers to believe we did a head or face replacement for because it seemed batshit crazy to do it any other way… and it truly is 100% Michael for both twins.
How long have you worked on this show?
Michael: From start to finish, it was almost exactly one year. James and I signed on early March 2024, and we signed off just before the NYC premiere in March 2025. We had 66 days of principal photography starting in May 2024, mostly on location, in Louisiana and returned to LA mid of July 2025. No additional photography, besides some VFX elements and additional lensgrids/maps and charts.
What’s the VFX shot count?
James: 1013 active VFX shots in the film.
Michael: The film is 2h 18mins long with credits, our total active finals reel is 1h 5mins – so around 50%+ of the film went through the VFX pipeline.
What is your next project?
Michael: Isn’t this the question that everyone usually says “can’t talk about it yet” – all I can say is that we are sticking with Ryan and Proximity, and his trusted team of collaborators.
What are the four movies that gave you the passion for cinema?
Michael: I generally love action movies of the 90s, before the big sequel and super hero wave started… Point Break, True Lies, Speed, Fight Club – all films shot in and around LA. No other place in the world has iconic locations like that, nowhere else you get as much consistent beautiful sunlight 360 days a year, and you can see that in those films.
I also like somewhat sarcastic films like Almost Famous, American Beauty and Boogie Nights. For VFX, The Matrix was groundbreaking, as was Children of Men. It matters to me that the VFX work is timeless, that is what ultimately determines how good the VFX quality really was – how well the effects work ages. The first Iron Man, the first Transformers, those films still look great in every aspect.
Having said all of the above – like I said at the very beginning: What truly sparked my interest in a career in VFX was a little short film called “405”: Two guys landed a CG airliner on the highway and did all of that with off-the-shelf gear and software in their basement… in 2001! That blew my mind.
James: RoboCop. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Gremlins. Terminator 2. 😀
A big thanks for your time.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Storm Studios: Dedicated page about Sinners on Storm Studios website.
Rising Sun Pictures: Dedicated page about Sinners on Rising Sun Pictures website.
ILM: Dedicated page about Sinners on ILM website.
Outpost VFX: Dedicated page about Sinners on Outpost VFX website.
Light VFX: Dedicated page about Sinners on Light VFX website.
© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025
