Following our work on Dead Reckoning, we returned to the Mission Impossible franchise for The Final Reckoning, continuing our collaboration with director Christopher McQuarrie. Our work on the feature encompassed high-end compositing and screen graphic design across multiple sequences, including immersive submarine environments and additional moments throughout the film, seamlessly embedding complex graphics into the action. By owning the compositing stage, we could simulate authentic physical properties like CRT phosphor bleeds and LCD sub-pixel structures, ensuring the tech felt tactile and grounded.
Ethan Hunt boards the USS Ohio with Captain Jack Bledsoe to track the sunken Russian sub Sevastopol which holds the source code for “The Entity”. Plotting a critical mission to to prevent global catastrophe, the sequence brings the audience into the situation unfolding.
As Ethan and the Captain Bledsoe prepare, the rest of the ship’s control room is revealed; featuring displays presenting sonar, positioning data, maps and other data streams to the crew. We consulted with submarine captains to help ensure authenticity of display graphics then integrated the graphics tightly into the live‑action plates, making the technology look realistic and operational whilst visually supporting the action.
The hand scanner marks Gabriel’s attempt to access a secured room in order to gain control of systems linked to the Entity, but the biometric scan denies him entry, cutting off his progress. From a design perspective, we used layered parallax, high-frequency data splines, and a jittery, staccato animation style to reflect an AI intelligence operating at a speed far beyond human comprehension.
Invisible VFX work including wire removal, glare cleanup, adjustment to the density and direction of bubbles, and the insertion of the dive watch screen graphics.
An iconic part of any Mission Impossible chapter, we helped the development of the mission briefing referencing a mix of aesthetics including microfiche scans, and motion graphics composited on a mix of analogue CRT, and LCD screens.
