Framestore’s Melbourne studio helped bring Australian writer-director Michael Shanks’ mind-bending horror Together to life, crafting striking, emotionally charged VFX for one of the year’s most talked-about indie films.
Tasked with visualising the film’s surreal body horror and emotionally charged transformations, VFX Supervisor Josh Simmonds and Framestore’s Melbourne team delivered bold, arresting visuals that blur the line between intimacy and terror – melding technical precision with narrative power.
**Spoiler Alert: The following contains major spoilers for Together**
The first sequence unfolds at the start of the third act, when an invisible force violently drags Millie and Tim together in the middle of the night. As they resist, their arms begin to fuse in a painful, sinewy tangle of flesh and bone. The second, more emotionally charged sequence appears at the film’s climax, where the couple fully surrenders to their fate. As they embrace, their bodies merge in a transformation that’s designed to be both beautiful and horrifying.
Creating the visceral spectacle of Together presented Framestore’s Melbourne team with a series of formidable, flesh-twisting challenges.
“Each shot demanded a bespoke approach, with live-action performances forming the foundation for complex anatomical transformations.”
Josh Simmonds, VFX Supervisor, Framestore Melbourne
The team worked to seamlessly merge practical footage with surreal distortion, striking a careful balance between realism and nightmare.
Director Michael Shanks often pushed for more extreme, unnatural contortions, encouraging Framestore to rework performances to heighten both the physical and emotional tension. This called for full-limb replacements and meticulously crafted animation that remained true to the actors’ movements a task made all the more intricate by the human eye’s sensitivity to anatomical detail.
Among the most challenging moments was a lingering macro close-up of Millie and Tim’s eyes merging a haunting image where eyelids connect and lashes intertwine like threads. Achieving the right blend of anatomical realism and surreal beauty demanded extraordinary precision, especially under the scrutiny of 4K clarity and daylight lighting.
The Melbourne team developed precision-crafted digi-doubles with pore-level detail and realistic lighting, powered by Framestore’s proprietary renderer Freak. Using a layered anatomical simulation approach, each muscle, fascia, and skin surface was individually sculpted and animated for hyper-realistic deformation and control.
“Our character pipeline had to be re-engineered to accommodate supernatural anatomy that still felt human. It was a constant negotiation between realism and the surreal.”
Josh Simmonds, VFX Supervisor, Framestore Melbourne
FX Lead Steve Oakley led the development of custom Vellum-based simulations in Houdini, enabling high-frequency skin wrinkling and bone shifting with fine-tuned artistic direction. This modular workflow allowed Framestore’s animation, FX, lighting, and compositing teams to iterate faster and achieve nuanced, emotionally resonant results.
Every step of the process was a negotiation between the science of simulation and the art of storytelling. Through a combination of custom rigs, anatomically layered simulations, and close collaboration across departments, Framestore’s artists and technologists transformed a grotesque fusion into a hauntingly beautiful expression of love and loss. Together stands as a testament to what’s possible when creative ambition meets anatomical precision and to our Melbourne team’s artistry, innovation, and relentless pursuit of powerful visual storytelling.
