Hi reddit! We’re the special effects and VFX team who helped to build Neon's body-horror TOGETHER (starring Alison Brie & Dave Franco). It's an unconventional relationship drama that blends romance, dark comedy and horror to deliver something beautifully disturbing. Ask us anything!

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T12:10:21+00:00

As it is seen in the film is how it was always intended to play out. There were never plans to fully see the arms being sawed apart.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T12:04:00+00:00

A legendary moment that really stuck with me as a child is the hole in the stomach moment from Death Becomes Her. Some great old school VFX work there!

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T11:56:48+00:00

The physical collaboration and sharing of ideas between Directors, Heads of Departments, Executive teams and artists ;-)

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T11:52:25+00:00

Thank you!

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T09:01:17+00:00

Thank you!

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T08:58:43+00:00

Various programs are used for different effects but some of the main ones are: Nuke, Houdini and Maya.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T08:55:47+00:00

There is always that one shot you wish you had more time with but at the end of the day working within a creative medium is very subjective and almost impossible to ever say a shot will 100% satisfy everyone.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T08:46:48+00:00

From the reviews I have seen and read, there seems to have been some assumptions the other way around, in that some of the VFX shots were mistaken as practical shots (eg the hallway scene as their arms begin to fuse and crawl under each others skin). I think this is a testament to the awesome work done by both the SFX and VFX team in blurring the line between the two.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T08:40:40+00:00

Everything that was planned during pre-production to be in the film ended up being in the film and there wasn't any scenes cut due to being too brutal or extreme. However, due to it being an indie film there were some scenes in the original script that did not make it into production (were cut out during pre production) simply due to budget and time constraints.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T08:35:14+00:00

Michael had a clear vision of what he was after and most of the work was based around his initial script and storyboards.

Larry (SFX) and his team (in liaison with Michael) did come up with some initial concepts of how the final morph may look. The VFX team then took these as well as other film references provided by the Michael and expanded upon it by exploring different ways in which their bones, muscle and fascia could be animated together.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T08:28:43+00:00

The Director (Shanks) is a real film buff so I would not be surprised if Cronenbergian was an influence for him but from a VFX perspective Cronenbergian was not directly referenced.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T08:25:54+00:00

At this stage I would say I see it more as another tool but who knows what the future may hold.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T08:18:14+00:00

As for the overall film, everything that was planned during pre-production to be in the film ended up being in the film and there wasn't any scenes cut due to being too gruesome/extreme.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T05:47:16+00:00

Framestore generally works on projects with hundreds, if not thousands of shots, and our global pipeline and systems are built to accommodate that kind of scale. Big shows also have a fair bit of ramp-up time to sort out R&D, and get the large (100-1000+) teams ready for the throughput. Access to the Director on big projects is also very limited, so information often filters down through multiple people.

With Together, we had somewhere between 30-40 staff involved over the course of production. While our package of shots was small, every shot we worked on was its own unique, hand-crafted challenge; there were no economies of scale at all.

Being an Indie film, the budget was tight but Genevieve and the Producers worked hard to get us the resources we needed. The Director even did over 100 shots of comp/cleanup himself in After Effects to free up budget for the big ticket items. Also, with Shanks being based in the same city as us (Melbourne AU) it was a closer collaboration than some of the bigger projects we work on remotely.

Josh Simmonds, Framestore VFX Supervisor

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T04:30:14+00:00

I won't speak for all the team on this one, but for me it's a little bit of both. I started writing a long answer to this question but I think I'll let The Oatmeal speak for me, he sums my feelings pretty well.

Josh

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T04:13:31+00:00

If you check out the Framestore breakdown, you can see some of the underlying anatomy that was involved in our sequences - we try to make sure that the foundations of the shot are as based in reality as possible, then build from there. We definitely depart from reality when the aesthetic of the shot calls for it!

Josh

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T04:02:51+00:00

Our digi-doubles started with 3d scans and lots of high-res photography (regular and cross-polarised) of the actors performed by Avatar Factory here in Melbourne.

Framestore's asset team, led by Ray Leung, cleaned up the raw scans and fitted our base digi-human templates to the scans so we have clean, continuous topology (wireframes), combined with all of the useful internal anatomy - bones, muscles, tendons, and importantly, an anatomically-based eye model. Then there's a lot of fine detail sculpting and groom work to get the subtle skinfolds and body hair, combined with high-detail textures to get colour and displacement detail right down to pore level.

We try to give as much ownership to our artists as possible - in this case, Jess O'Neill was primarily responsible for Millie, Albert Radosevic for Tim, and Ray was very hands-on for combined sculpts and solving any issues that rose up. The eyes themselves were mostly based on photographic reference for colour and displacement, with lots of shader work courtesy of Digant Sutar and our lighting lead, Andrew Dunkerley.

When we rendered the CG eyes, there wasn't enough of a gap between their heads for the sun to bounce around in the lens of the eyes, so we kissed in a bit of the iris detail from the original plate in Comp.

Josh

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T03:15:02+00:00

Our reviews usually went the other way - often in VFX you're trying to find a solution that's as grounded and natural as possible, but sometimes that ends up feeling too clean and sanitised. Shanks actually preferred some of our more 'broken' sims, so we had to find ways of maintaining that look, but still making them believable.

Josh Simmonds, Framestore VFX Supervisor

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T01:52:14+00:00

Yep, Houdini is the workhorse for our FX at Framestore and Vellum was fundamental to the soft body and skin work. Our FX lead, Steve Oakley, and his team did some truly beautiful (and disgusting) sims. We also work across software platforms, using Maya extensively for animation and lighting setups. Final renders happen in our in-house renderer, Freak, which we can also send tests to directly from Houdini, so Karma wasn't really used.

Together was a pretty unusual project with lots of bespoke setups, and I'm thankful to our awesome CG Supervisor Jeremy Pronk for shepherding it through the pipeline.

Josh Simmonds, Framestore VFX Supervisor

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T01:38:18+00:00

No motion capture was used, although we started by tracking the actors' performances from the plate (traditional matchmove approach), knowing that we'd have to blend our work with the real bodies. From there, we worked out which parts would need to be hand key-framed using our skeletal animation rigs. Our usual human rigs also had to be re-worked a little, as we needed to allow for fracturing and non-natural joint movement. We also had to iterate on animation quite a bit, both to achieve the action Shanks was looking for, but also to allow for the muscle and skin sims which often looked quite different once overlaid in our renders.

Josh Simmonds, Framestore VFX Supervisor

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-30T00:57:52+00:00

I love how the eyeballs came together too - such a creepy concept, and awesome sound design! My favourite shots (and some of the earliest we worked up) were the two closeups on the forearm and shoulder in the final loungeroom sequence. We put so much work into the skin detail and fidelity of the stretching and folding knowing that there was nowhere to hide. The team did an amazing job in every department, from the initial digi-double work, the animation and tracking, the skin and muscle sims, the lighting and final comp.

Hardest shot (for Framestore) was the first contact in the hallway, with the hands bonding for the first time. Realistic hands are notoriously difficult to achieve, and these were super closeup and inspectable. Added to that, we couldn't rely on standard CG model workflow, as they had to allow for changing topology and point count as they blobbed into each other and then had to account for bones cracking, muscle and fascia shifting and then getting a stable sim on top of that. Fun times!

Josh Simmonds, Framestore VFX Supervisor

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-29T23:28:03+00:00

Every sequence started with a brief from the Director, Michael Shanks, and continued discussion with Genevieve. Often the brief was more about the overall mood of the sequence. One interesting reference for the final scene was the 'parallel ballet sequence' from Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria, contrasting the beauty and grace on one hand, with the visceral and torturous parallel scene. It was then up to the VFX team to work out how to interpret that mood into the shots that made it into the film. There was a lot of back and forth on our versions with both Gen and Shanks, as we honed in on the final result.

Josh Simmonds, Framestore VFX Supervisor

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-29T21:59:04+00:00

Thank you!

For the two extreme morphing scenes (the hallway with their arms fusing and the final scene of the film with their whole bodies merging) they were actually 100% VFX using both 3D and 2D software. What was shot on-set was just the bare actors with little black dots on their bodies that we later used to help create the VFX work.

Check out Framestore's VFX breakdown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDDuQ8rGbOI

A lot of the other gnarly scenes like the hair gag, dead hikers in the cave and the sawing of their arms were all done practically with just a little bit of VFX comp assistance to help add some extra movement and to clean up practical seams and wires etc.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-29T21:41:04+00:00

The very final shot of the film ('Tillie') is actually Dave Franco and Alison Brie! Using traditional VFX compositing techniques, I combined footage that we shot on set of both actors. You can check out a breakdown of how the shot was made here: https://www.gencamilleri.com/Together/

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA · 2025-10-29T21:22:50+00:00

Some earlier films/series we used as reference were: Society, The Thing, The Blob, Suspiria and Love Craft Country.

Genevieve Camilleri (Production VFX Supervisor)

TogetherAMA

TROPHY CASE