Ever since its debut at Sundance earlier this year, fans of horror have had Michael Shanks’ new film, Together, on their radars. Neon picked it up out of the festival and, after some really creepy trailers and marketing, opened it in theaters last weekend with solid results. It’s a provocative, surprising, and incredibly disgusting movie with an ending viewers will not soon forget. An ending that was achieved through traditional methods of visual effects and without a hint of AI.
As per that spoiler warning above, we’re about to explain what happens at the end of Together, so if you haven’t seen it and want to, we urge you to look away right now.
In the film Tim and Millie (Dave Franco and Alison Brie) get infected by this unexplained force that wants their bodies to become one. The how and why behind it is pretty weird, mysterious, and fun, but eventually, the couple realize the only way to defeat this force is to give in to it. And so we watch as their bodies combine from two into one, and, in the film’s final shot, a completely new person, the amalgamation of both of them, opens the door to Millie’s visiting parents.
Speaking on Indiewire’s Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, Shanks explained that both the blending of the bodies and the new character were achieved without the use of AI. “The amount of screenings I’ve gone to now, and people come up to me and say, ‘Was that AI at the end?’ It’s just so crazy that people assume AI is now the cause. We’ve used absolutely none of it on this film,” Shanks said. “As a VFX guy, as somebody that’s worked with all these teams that put in so much work, it’s so frustrating now that people look at something that looks interesting or good, and they [assume] just a computer made it. It’s like, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’”
Instead, the “Tillie” character was created using makeup and visual effects compositing by Genevieve Camilleri. “In pre-production, Gen just went up and took photos of Dave and Alison and then in Nuke, she made a bunch of variations on which elements to take from which of their faces to figure out what is essential to seeing both of them in that final image,” Shanks said.
Then, on the day, the director shot the scene with both actors. “After we shot the scene with Alison, we moved in Dave, with a bunch of dots on his face,” he continued. “Gen has taken his jaw and his lips and stuck that onto the bottom [of the face]. It’s really a combination of makeup and, you wouldn’t call it CGI, because nothing’s computer-generated, but it’s compositing.”
Stepping back a bit from the specifics of Together, it’s wild that Shanks has to defend that his film didn’t use generative AI. If it had come out even just 3-4 years ago, it would not have even been a thought. We all would’ve just assumed it was one of them dressing up as the other or visual effects. Ultimately, it’s kind of both. But the whole conversation changed when we began living in a world where you can put “Dave Franco and Alison Brie as one person” into a program and get something back in seconds. Basically, props to Shanks for doing something right, working hard at it, and making something memorable. And boo to the world for making us forget that the real magic of filmmaking comes from the human touch.
Together is now in theaters.
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