‘Extrapolations:’ How Ashley Bernes Used Various Visual Effects Disciplines to Show the Devastating Effects of Climate Change

Extrapolations, an 8-part anthology series on Apple TV+, uses scientific projections to extrapolate what the effects of climate change might look like in the near future. The interconnected stories are portrayed by an A-list cast that includes Kit Harington, Sienna Miller, Edward Norton, Marion Cotillard, and Meryl Streep.

Working closely with creator Scott Z. Burns and guided by extensive research and input from specialists, visual effects supervisor Ashley Bernes created a lush, distinctive look for the series. Consisting of over 1,500 VFX shots, every visual component,  ranging from the color of the sky to scientific phenomena and fictional scientific advances, was designed with care and consideration.

“This show was incredibly diverse with the type of VFX work we had to do,” says Bernes.

Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Bernes details that VFX work and discusses how the Extrapolations team generated a future that looks and feels terrifyingly real.

Awards Daily: I read that Extrapolations was a passion project for everyone involved. Climate Change has touched us all in some way or another. What did working on the project mean to you?

Ashley Bernes: Meaningful narratives are few and far between. When you’re faced with the opportunity to work on something which is truly an important message and story, you take it.

In our family, we’re conscious about the products we use; we’re conscious about industrial agriculture, and we’re conscious about things that we consume. We go about our lives with the environment in mind. And, when Extrapolations came around, it was ticking a lot of boxes in terms of the type of visual effects that the show was looking to do. I also wanted to contribute to this story; this message was important to get out.

Scott Burns was one of the producers very involved in An Inconvenient Truth, which I had seen in theaters. When I first met with him, he was very proud of that, and he was very glad that it got out and reached many people, but I think he felt like it never reached enough people. Or it was reaching a demographic who were already interested in the environment. For him, Extrapolations was an opportunity to help shape that meaningful narrative into a scripted series that hopefully would reach more people. 

In 20 years, when my daughter asks me what I did to be part of this world we live in, I’ll be able to say, ‘I did this, which was something, as well as the other things we do in our day-to-day lives. Contributing my time to a project that had a meaningful narrative is important. And, as you said, everybody bought into that, subscribed to that, and was on board with the same thinking in terms of wanting to be part of this story.

And really, up and down the pipeline from how waste was handled on the production; from electric rental cars to recycling and composting on set; it wasn’t just, ‘Let’s put the words on the page and put ’em on screen. It was a holistic approach to making the entire show environmentally conscious. It was a great experience. 

AD: How did you get involved with Extrapolations?

AB: How this originally got to me was the production designer, Philip Messina. He and I had done a project together for Amazon called Tales from the Loop, and he has done a number of projects with Greg Jacobs, who was one of the executive producers and directors of Extrapolations. The question of who the visual effects supervisor would be was asked early on. They needed to bring someone on quickly because of the world-building, because of the technology building, because of the future aspects of this show, how they were going to shoot it at the time, we were going to have our stages in Vancouver, this was during peak pandemic times. They had a two-week quarantine in place. It was proving very difficult to get talent to sign up. But not only that, the show has a global footprint in terms of where each episode is placed and how we would do that. So these questions were being asked, and long story short, Phil was a big advocate of mine in terms of recommending me and also bringing me on early to a very small crew on board in early prep, trying to find the fundamentals of how we would do this show and what kind of approach we could take to specific challenges we faced. I met with Greg and Scott soon after that, and we really hit it off. Extrapolations were also shot here in New York, so I got to stay home, which is always a luxury. 

AD: I loved that Extrapolations takes place far enough in the future for you to feel like it’s not exactly what we’re with living now, but close enough to our reality that everything feels familiar. What did that idea mean for you as the visual effects supervisor?

AB: You are absolutely right in the sense that the year 2000 is further away than our first episode is in the future (2037). So that idea was, ‘What would technology look like? Are there flying cars? Are there holograms?’ All of the decisions wanted to be grounded in, ‘Well, what have the last 20 years told us?’ Today the world looks pretty similar. We just use technology in very different ways. Mobile technology has changed how we do things, but the world looks the same.

Moving through the timeline, our first episode was around 2037, and the last was 2070. The technology was one barometer. We wanted to depict the environmental changes and how things looked correctly. 

How we approached it started with words on the page, Scott’s writing in terms of the story he wanted to tell. We had many meetings about the type of things he liked, and I would pull references. We’d look at things and discuss whether something was too far in the future or not far enough. And we were lucky to partner with a lot of specialists in various fields. We had technology evangelists; we were talking to futurists in terms of, ‘This is what we want to do; this is what we want to say— is any of this plausible? Or. ‘What are the things that sound like this? How can we find out more about them? So, that wasn’t necessarily just a technology issue. We’d have the same type of professionals for some of the environmental questions. For example, in the second episode, “Whale Fall,” where such a significant component of the episode takes place underwater, we had to discover what that would look like and how can that be part of the climate change story in terms of what we want to represent. I was lucky enough to meet with an ocean specialist about the plausibility of certain things— how cloudy the ocean water could be with sea level temperatures changing, the plausibility of nuances in the color of the water, and how temperature changes affect how light might reflect and refract on the water.

We wanted to ground everything in reality and base it on real-world research and predictions, but we still ended up with something cinematic and something we wanted to put on screen. 

AD: I’d like to get a sense of your working timeline. How much time did you have for research and the execution of those ideas?

AB: There was some very early prep work that I described earlier with Scott Burns, maybe six or seven weeks of, ‘What is the show? How do we do it? Can we shoot it in one place? If we don’t, what do we need to do? How do we use visual effects to depict these other countries?’ Once that period was over and the show was greenlit, and people started to come on board, there were probably about 12 weeks of prep where we were setting up the stages; we’re establishing our set builds, we’re doing all our location scouts, and preparing for the shoot. And four months or so of production; eight episodes, of course. Scott Burns, the showrunner and executive producer, directed episodes one, two, and six, the first ones we shot. Greg Jacobs did the third one, which was the next one up. And then, the rest was split with four other directors. Nicole Holofcener did episode seven; Michael Morris did eight; Richie Mehta did five; and Ellen Kuras did episode four. 

AD: I think good visual effects are taken for granted because they blend into the narrative. What VFX moments from the show would you like to highlight? 

AB: That’s an interesting question. There are definitely those standout moments where you want people to know it’s an effect. Let’s say the holograms in the pilot episode where the activist is broadcasting a message all over the world—that’s part of that story. But there are other things, like some of the location-based challenges. This whole thing was shot in New York City, but the episodes take place all over the world. How do we represent Rabin Square and Tel Aviv with thousands of people protesting around this giant hologram? How do we do that in New York City? That’s just one example of many in each episode of just how to leverage visual effects. In our case, we had this great location, the Queens Museum, which served as both an interior and exterior, an interior for some different scenes and the exterior of the protest. We used classic set extension techniques like blue screens in the background and crowd duplication; we did a second unit for Tel Aviv so that we could match all the angles and get all the shots that we needed to fill in the backgrounds, with a lot of visual effects in between to make it work. But I would say the location-based VFX was probably the most, not necessarily unsung, but perhaps the most invisible. 

AD: The level of detail you mentioned is fascinating, like researching whether the water would be cloudy. Tell me more about those minute details that add to the world-building but may not necessarily be the star of the show.

AB: Really, every episode had that. Let’s talk about episode five, which featured the concept of wet bulb. It’s extreme heat with a humidity component that there is a time limit on how much you can spend in that kind of heat before you effectively incur some medical issues. We had to research what that would look like and how we would represent that when we’re obviously not shooting under those conditions. We looked at things like heat haze, how to leverage color, and what we would do to the sky. And speaking of the sky, in episode four, we deal with a lot of concepts around geoengineering which is a theoretical idea of how to combat various things within our atmosphere. But, we wanted to represent that in some accurate ways that we do know about today. So, for the scenes where the drones are exploding in the sky, the idea was that they would block out the harmful rays and lower the Earth’s temperature. What it actually does is destroy the atmosphere itself. But the idea around how we visually represented those was called a fallstreak cloud, which is a natural phenomenon. It’s a cloud formation that looks otherworldly. It’s a strange circular, voided shape with multi-spectral colors. We wanted to ground this idea in something people might see on the show and then come across online and recognize them. So again, it was always about trying to ground things in reality or plausibility or taking something from nature and leveraging it for the screen. 

AD: The scope of just how much VFX was needed for Extrapolations is astounding. 

AB: Yes! We had roughly 1,500 visual effects shots. I think one of the particularly interesting things about this show, both going into it and now with the postmortem of it all being aired, is that this show was incredibly diverse with the type of work we had to do. I’ve talked about environment VFX work a lot, but this isn’t a show where we’re just dealing with environment extensions. We have episodes with scenes that take place in the sky. We have episodes that take place underwater. We’re representing technology that doesn’t exist. We have character work; we’ve got a walrus that kills someone. We’ve got a whale who’s a central character. We’ve got a bear in episode 107. So, we’ve got a lot of graphics work. The idea of, ‘How do people interface with graphics in the future?’ The idea around bio-links and cerebral messages—the social and employment aspects of that. We really did everything in terms of the various disciplines within visual effects. We found the best partners to work with for design and implementation.

Episode 106 is a good example; it’s a very close-quartered, personal story about one central character’s struggle with losing his memories. How we depicted his memory loss included an extensive design process. We were trying to find the visual language and create an emotional reaction on-screen. We’re all using our phones all day long. This episode has this concept of “the Bio-Link,” which goes on your temple and allows you to interface with various pieces of software through your brain. We had to show how he was using it, what this interface would look like, and how it may be used. And, of course, designing interfaces and the usability of those interfaces takes a very long time and is a very specialist skill set. So that was particularly challenging in terms of traditional visual effects. Our workflow isn’t always graphics design based; it’s a lot of other disciplines of modeling, animation, texturing, and dynamics in terms of blowing things up. But actually, designing graphics is a very niche thing within visual effects. It’s a great experience to create images that hopefully will stand the test of time.