Two recent pieces are worth a closer look if you’re into how VFX actually gets made — one is a scrappy, built-set trick, the other is a look at large-scale studio output.
Backrooms: Extending Sets and Faking the Impossible
VFX studio Mr. Wolf recently put out a breakdown reel for Backrooms, the horror hit directed by Kane Parsons. Parsons started the project as a series of viral YouTube videos before turning it into a feature, and he still works closely on the VFX side alongside supervisor Ed Douglas.
The breakdown covers two things:
- Set extension — the production built physical Backrooms sets, and Mr. Wolf’s job was extending them digitally to make the space feel endless without losing the grounded, practical texture that made the original videos work.
- The “no-clipping” shots — a reference to the video-game glitch where a camera or character passes through solid geometry. Recreating that look on film took a mix of practical set design and digital compositing.
It’s a good example of VFX in service of a specific aesthetic, rather than just “make it bigger.” The full technical breakdown is being covered in more depth in befores & afters’ upcoming Backrooms issue, for anyone who wants the full pipeline explanation.
DNEG’s New Showreel
Separately, DNEG released a new compilation reel covering some of its biggest current projects: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the Indian epic Ramayana, and Masters of the Universe.
A few numbers worth including for context: DNEG is one of the largest independent VFX companies in the world, with staff estimated in the 8,000–9,000 range spread across London, Mumbai, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chennai, and Montreal. The studio holds eight Best Visual Effects Oscars — more than any studio besides ILM — for films including Inception, Interstellar, Blade Runner 2049, and both Dune films.
The new reel is a useful watch alongside the Ramayana trailer specifically, since it shows some of the environment and creature work — including a flying-elephant battle sequence — that doesn’t come through as clearly in a 90-second trailer.
Two Ends of the Same Industry
Side by side, these two stories show the range VFX work covers right now: a small team using digital tools to stretch a practical set into something disorienting and impossible, and a several-thousand-person studio building out entire mythological worlds for a global tentpole. Same toolset, very different scale.
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