“Black Mirror’s” standout Season 4 episode “USS Callister” wore its “Star Trek” influences on its sleeve. When Netflix announced that Season 7 of the tech horror anthology created by Charlie Brooker would be returning to that world in “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” VFX supervisor James MacLachlan knew the visual elements of the new episode would have to broaden its influences.
In the sequel, the digital avatars of Nanette (Cristin Milioti) and her crew that the evil gaming company co-founder Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons) created to torture in perpetuity are released into the larger Infinity game and must scavenge for supplies from other players to survive. According to MacLachlan, creating the look of the virtual world and its numerous environments—desert, forest, ice planet—and steering the violence away from hyper-realism were his biggest challenges.
“’No Man’s Sky’ came up a couple of times, just in terms of how we built into these worlds,” he said, referring to the colorful, retro-futuristic multiplayer survival game by Hello Games. “It was really important that it was not gory and bloody. It was game-y, in terms of the fragging and the teleportations and all these sorts of things.” (“Fragging” is gamer-speak for killing an opponent and blowing them to pieces.) At first, the team created “glassy explosions that were like shards,” but they felt too violent. So they designed explosions whose particles looked like less disturbing-looking cubes.
To create the space battles, “USS Callister: Into Infinity” embraced “Star Wars” as much as the original episode nodded to “Star Trek.” That becomes most evident in the final dogfight between the Callister crew and online players rallied by Daly’s business partner Walton (Jimmi Simpson) to take them out. MacLachlan, his team and director Toby Haynes started choreographing the sequence in an office using paper airplanes and phone cameras. “That gives you the bones of how some of the hero shots need to play out,” MacLachlan said.
In addition to “Star Wars,” they studied WWII fighter jet footage and high-energy car movies like “Rush.” As they broke the final space battle, when Nanette kills a Daly clone in the Death Star-like Heart of Infinity and frees her team from digital prison, MacLachlan, Brooker and Haynes again focused on keeping the attacks firmly rooted in an obviously fictional world of video game aesthetics.
“It was important to make sure that we didn’t build it in a way that it felt too grounded in reality,” the VFX supervisor explained. “I think that’s when you start to fall apart a little bit. It’s important that Infinity felt immersive. You need to understand you’re in a game world at these points in time. And so you have got laser fire, you have got all this beautiful light. You have got swirling ships flying around and shooting lasers at each other. It’s something we’re all very used to.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Down to the Wire Drama issue here.
