08: What 300+ VFX Shots Actually Looks Like
Three hundred is a number that tends to surprise people the moment they hear it attached to a film like this. It's the kind of shot count most audiences - and a fair number of industry people - assume requires a massive VFX studio behind it. Resonance didn't have one. It had a small team, a lot of patience, and around two years to get it right.
The first thing worth calling out is what that number is actually made of. When people picture VFX-heavy filmmaking, they picture the obvious sequences - the cosmic space, the dimensional rifts, the moments where something clearly impossible is happening on screen. Those are in there, and some of them are anything but subtle by design. The temporal distortions inside the house - walls that visibly breathe, objects openly shifting between states - aren't hiding from the audience. They're meant to be seen and to feel “wrong” or out of place. Alongside those, the count is filled out with quieter work too: a gag as simple as a slice of bread vanishing into a rift, the previously called out “en-fogment” (no, that’s not a word) of our location, or someone visibly ageing before our eyes. Some shots want to be caught. Others are built to pass without comment. Three hundred shots covers the whole range, and that range is the point - this isn't a film that picked one register and stayed there.
This entry is also where the two-year post-production timeline gets its explanation, because I think leaving it unexplained does the whole effort a disservice. For most of those two years, this shot count was led and shouldered by essentially one person as a constant throughout. On top of that, once we wrapped Resonance's three-week shoot, I moved almost immediately into co-directing It Will Find You with Chris Broadbent, and not long after that into producing and filming Crashout with Nick Annas. My fellow producer on all these films, Helen Tuck, right there by my side. Resonance's post ran in parallel with both of those, not sequentially after them. The delay isn't a story about something going wrong. It's a story about a single VFX Supervisor (Ryan McCalla), together with a production house running at maximum capacity across multiple fronts at once - and all of us choosing not to rush the film that needed the most patience.
That patience connects back to something I said earlier in these journal entries: this production was, among other things, a genuine test of cutting edge machine learning VFX tools that were largely untested at this scale when we started. The distinction I want to be precise about, because it matters to us ethically as much as aesthetically before this becomes an AI vs Humans conversation: these tools were never used to generate footage from nothing. Every shot in that 300+ count is built on top of real photography of real actors, delivering real performances on a real set. The ML layer transforms and enhances what was actually captured. It doesn't invent what wasn't.
That same two-year period would have been easily double without these tools to explore.
At the time, we didn't know for certain that would hold up across over the full film. There was real uncertainty in that - plenty of shots that didn't work on the first pass, plenty of iteration that looked, for a while, like it might not converge on something usable within any reasonable timeframe. What I can tell you now, from the other side of it, is that it did, and it’s just another aspect of what the ‘ultra-indie experiment’ looked like on this film.