VFX Breakdown Looking Up

Here are the shots Terminal FX delivered for Looking Up, the 2019 drama Deng Chao and Yu Baimei directed together. The film’s two settings pull the work in opposite directions and the reel shows both: spacecraft, orbit and hard-surface CG on one side, and on the other the environment and cleanup work that returns a present-day location to an earlier decade.

An orbital shot is a lighting problem before it is anything else. One hard source, no atmosphere to soften it, and reflective panels and visors that report every mistake — so models must be built to close-up tolerance and lit against on-set reference, while free-floating performers need harness removal, subtle retiming and compositing to take away the weight the floor gave them. The earthbound material is quieter and no less exacting: signage, aerials, vehicles and skylines replaced or erased frame by frame so a period holds, digital matte work filling in what a location could not provide, water and atmosphere simulated where the story asks for scale. Both halves end in the same place — roto, paint and a comp that has to disappear into the grain and contrast of the footage it joins. Terminal FX covered that range on Looking Up, and this reel puts it side by side with the plates.