VFX Supervisor Aaron Raff Reveals How Visual Effects Played into the Landscape of ‘A Murder at the End of the World’

Awards Daily talks to A Murder at the End of the World VFX Supervisor Aaron Raff about adding visual effects to cold and desert environments and removing the humanness from AI assistant, Ray.

Spoiler alert: In real life, there isn’t a sprawling futuristic hotel like Andy Ronson’s (Clive Owen) in Iceland. That bit of TV magic was created by A Murder at the End of the World VFX Supervisor, Aaron Raff.

“There was no actual location in Iceland that had struck the right balance of technologically futuristic but super thoughtfully designed,” said Raff. “And [show creators] Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij also wanted the set to have tones of being a bunker. There were all these subliminal cues that they wanted to put in this hotel, and I think from early scouting, they saw that there wasn’t any one real place where they could do it.”

So they took an existing hotel and layered visual effects onto it, while playing into Darby’s (Emma Corrin) emotions.

“What can we do to the shot that makes it subliminally reflect how Darby’s feeling inside? We played a lot with things, of course, like weather, and if there were wisps of snow moving and if the hotel felt choked in and cloistered, or if there was a bright light hitting it and we see it with clarity. In some shots, we move through mists, and the hotel’s revealed and that reflects how Darby’s feeling.”

The landscape colors also connect to our Gen Z amateur sleuth, even down to one very iconic detail.

“When we were in Iceland scouting, I spent a lot of time looking at the tones of sunsets. We’d often pause and think the pink of the sky is complementary to the production design color scheme or even the tone of Darby’s hair.”

While much of the series takes place in Iceland, through flashbacks, we get a completely different color palette and dynamic—first in seeing how Bill (Harris Dickinson) and Darby met and also in the Southwest setting, featuring a warmer color palette. The forest fire Darby and Bill witness becomes an important symbol.

“They’re in the desert, and yet they see dry shrubland burning, and that shocks them into a realization that the world is hitting a turning point, which connects to the other timeline in the future with Andy trying to solve the climate crisis. Even in the script phase, it was supposed to be almost like a vision that they see on a horizon, a visual symbol, a wall of apocalypse. Creating that with visual effects, there was a very specific tone. Brit directed that episode, and we spent a lot of time going through images of forest fires, looking through things that weren’t necessarily beautiful, but that were a wall of fire, imposing an apocalyptic feeling, and also something that would fit plausibly in that environment. We had to scope that it wasn’t just about adding the smoke and fire to that shot; we had to scope the horizon line to make it all fit compositionally.”

Raff also had to make it all look, well. . .depressing.

“It needed to look real, but there was the pacing of it, like having a tree branch fall at the same time, and it needed to look sad in a way because Bill and Darby are mourning this end of their adventure. They were just having this happy moment where they were smelling each other and being playful, and it’s such a bummer to see it. So you know, we had to hit the right tone. It couldn’t just be a scary raging fire. It almost had to look like a mournful, weeping one.”

While Raff had to add to environmental imagery like fire to deserts and drifts to snowscapes, he had to take away a bit when working on almost-human Ray, Ronson’s all-knowing AI assistant.

“The amazing thing about Ray is that 99 percent of how eerie that character is is just Edoardo Ballerini. The actor’s amazing delivery of that. He just strikes the perfect tone of like 96 percent human and then 4 percent terrifyingly fake. I was obsessed with his performance. To show him digitally on screen, I did the tiniest tweaks. For example, I would go in and make the whites of his eyes like 40 percent brighter. I would selectively take out a few of the finer wrinkles on his face, and I took out all the wrinkles on his shirt. So I was sanding off the tiniest edges, and it’s a similar way that his performance is just slightly unreal to make him pop a bit more like he’s a little bit too idealized.”

A Murder At The End of the World is streaming on Hulu.