[Editor’s note: The following interview contain spoilers for “Together.”]
These days, the internet is littered with face-merging apps as the ability to blend photos of two different people has become even more prevalent with the rise of artificial intelligence.
And it’s understandable that some audience members might think of those consumer apps when they see the last shot of the body horror “Together,” as Millie (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco) finally become one, but “Tillie” (the “Together” team’s nickname for the Brie/Franco merger) was far more carefully considered and skillfully executed.
“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,” said writer/director Michael Shanks when he was a guest on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “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.’”
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While VFX powerhouse Framestore did the heavy CGI build for the climatic hallway scene of the married (on- and off-screen) couple’s bodies being drawn into each other, and the film’s earlier brushes with togetherness relied primarily on the practical work of prosthetics designer Larry Van Duynhoven, the final “Tillie” shot was the product of makeup and careful old school compositing work by VFX supervisor Genevieve Camilleri.
“It’s not ‘The Substance,’ we’re not going to get a crazy monster opening the door. It had to be a regular person that you would walk by in the street and not notice,” said Shanks.
Camilleri’s challenge was significant, making someone who could pass as just another small town citizen living their life, but also be someone the audience immediately recognized as an amalgamation of Brie and Franco.
“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,” said Shanks.
The baseline starting point would be shooting Brie with a wig. The makeup team recreated Franco’s eyebrows and put them on Brie’s actual face. Tillie also has Brie’s natural eyes, but with brown contacts to match Franco’s eye color.
“After we shot the scene with Alison, we moved in Dave, with a bunch of dots on his face,” said Shanks. “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.”
A Neon release, “Together” is now in theaters.
To hear Michael Shanks’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
