Reminiscence is a film that offers an intriguing look into the potential future of our own world. Set in 2050, the sci-fi thriller follows Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a Miami-based private investigator whose repurposed military interrogation machine allows people to relive all the memories they hold dear. When a client named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) walks into Nick's life, she changes it for the better and suddenly disappears without a trace, she tries to find her. But Nick's desperate search through the flooded streets of Florida, a byproduct of a recent natural disaster, turns out to be more dangerous than he anticipated. Reminiscence's submerged frame and futuristic technology may seem far away, but they're not. Sea level rise and the ability to recall our memories are not remote possibilities; they are based on real life science and may be closer to the real thing than we think. With Reminiscence now available on HBO Max and in theaters, TechRadar spoke with visual effects supervisor Bruce Jones and production designer Howard Cummings to find out how their stage dystopia came to be. We also discuss the experimental, real-world technology that inspired Nick's memory machine, and the challenges associated with achieving both.
An idea comes up
(Image credit: Warner Bros.) From the beginning, writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) wanted to create a world in which coastal regions had been partly absorbed by the oceans. Real-world studies attributed rising sea waters to climate change, but Joy was reluctant to make claims about global warming through the Reminiscence plotline. Instead, she made the decision to focus on how humanity would adapt to life in flooded cities, with an Italian city serving as the model for Joy's vision. “Lisa is very visual in her storytelling, and she wanted global warming to be the cause of the flooding in Miami,” Cummings explains. “We looked at how people would adapt rather than abandon Florida and use it as Venice. So we created a map of Miami with the flooded and dry areas, and we marked them as areas where the poor and the rich lived. "To give audiences a clearer picture of its dystopian setting, Reminiscence opens with a three-minute aerial shot revealing the magnitude of the flooding. It's an even more impressive streak since Reminiscence was not shot in Miami. Rather, principal photography took place nearly 1.000 miles away in New Orleans, Louisiana. How, then, was Miami recreated in such painstaking detail for the initial viewing of Reminiscence? As Jones reveals, two specific imaging techniques are used: photogrammetry and Light Sensing and Ranging (LIDAR).The former, often used by architects, allows people to take multiple images of overlapping objects and recreate them as 3D models on a computer.Meanwhile,LIDAR uses a directed laser to build a representation accurate of Earth's topography. Combining them with aerial images of Miami allowed the visual effects team to rebuild the city from scratch. "We were finding nondescript or very specific streets in New Orleans that looked identical to the ones we'd seen in Miami," he explains. Jones. “We did a lot of drone references to Miami properties, then combined those shots with our New Orleans imagery using a combination of Google Earth, photogrammetry, and LIDAR. Rise, our main visual effects provider, then created all the models, textures, and shaders to create the visuals you see.
Build a memory machine
(Image credit: Warner Bros.) Reminiscence's flooded environment isn't the only aspect of world-building that's central to its plot. The memory machine is integral to the development of the story, with Nick and the local police department using it to shed light on Mae's disappearance. Its design was a two-pronged process: making it futuristic enough to show that technological advances took place between 2021 and 2050, but grounding it in realism based on the relatively short number of years that have passed. The machine's water-filled pod is similar to stasis pods seen in far-flung sci-fi properties, including Interstellar and Star Trek. Meanwhile, at least on the surface, the helmet's design resembles the electrode caps worn by patients during electroencephalograms (EEGs) to study brain activity, thus covering both design bases. Current medicine wasn't the only real-world technology that influenced the helmet's final form. As Cummings reveals, ongoing research at MIT has also played a role. “We had access to graduate student research,” Cummings says. “A student developed a device that rests on his chin and head and allows him to control a computer with his thoughts. Another student created a headdress that would interpret what people dreamed of. We watched a recorded demonstration where a computer combed through a database of images and found something that was close to what that person dreamed of. It was fascinating to watch, so we took those influences and incorporated them into the functionality of the machine.
(Image credit: Ben Rothstein / Warner Bros.) Part of this functionality is the recreation of customer memories, which aren't displayed as simple 2D wall projections that Nick is looking at. Instead, the design team built a circular set, dubbed the Hamburger, that allowed actors to walk around and view 3D memories from different angles. The incorporation of holographic technology also helped give a greater sense of science fiction to the proceedings. “We've done a lot of research into how holograms work,” explains Jones. “Everything from lasers and smoke-filled rooms to plexiglass, then we throw it all away. We wanted something more visceral; something you could almost touch. We wanted you to feel that connection between Nick and Mae where you think they are in the same room. But they are not, because one of them is a hologram. Advance Holologauze, a highly transparent and reflective projection surface that offers a 360-degree field of view around your subject. Created by audiovisual technologist Stuart Warren-Hills, Hologauze's support for polarized 3D images and screen graininess, desired elements of Reminiscence's memory recreations, made it an ideal choice for this part of the machine. “YouTube and for concerts he has used Hologauze,” Cummings explains. “He is famous for recreating Michael Jackson on stage and allowed our actors to react in real time to people's memories. We didn't want to add the memories later with visual effects, so we enlisted the help of Hologauze to create a system to project images of the memories.
System errors
(Image credit: Ben Rothstein / Warner Bros.) Semi-virtual movie productions are never without their problems, including reminiscence. Shooting the underwater footage and composing the 3.400-frame opening flyby plan were tough challenges to overcome. But both problems pale in comparison to the grueling problems of fitting the hologauze inside the cylindrical hamburger assembly. "Take any kind of fabric and wrap it around a cylinder, and it's concave in the middle," Cummings explains. “He gave us something unique from a shooting standpoint. But the problem was that we had to shoot our memory scenes ahead of time so our cast would have something to reference during the real world footage. Filming from memory sequences initially posed many problems. For one thing, the camera locations had to line up with each other. If a specific angle was used to film a sequence, the same camera position was needed to film scenes with live actors present. Otherwise, parallax, the process by which an object moves due to a change in the observer's point of view, would be unavoidable. “The camera shots need to line up, otherwise driving the camera carriage to the left or right, or up and down, will cause parallax,” Jones explains. "Running the hologauze on a curved surface, allowing the actors to walk around and interact with it, and getting shots that match the opening shot sequences, was my biggest shooting puzzle." It turns out that a simple piece of string, a far cry from the futuristic technology used in the film, allowed Joy to map the camera locations based on the diameter of Hamburger's set dimensions.
(Image credit: Warner Bros,) "When Nick is standing on the floor looking at a memory, it's a line of sight," says Cummings. “But when you look over your shoulder and look at a photo up close, it's a different perspective. So I gave Lisa some rope and said "stand where you need to to take a picture, move it around and you'll see what's in the field of view". With this, we built our projector system to accommodate specific angles for certain shots. "Despite his charismatic lead on Jackman and its gripping story, Reminiscence's meager €4.9 million box office take is indicative of its inability to capture viewers' attention. A mix of average to poor reviews, the HBO release Max and a slight increase in Covid-19 Delta variant cases won't help either.At a time when some viewers and industry workers want more originality from the studios, it's a shame it hasn't resonated with the public. developmental ingenuity, impressive world-building, and true science inspiration, Reminiscence deserved better, not only from a film appreciation standpoint, but from a science standpoint as well.Reminiscence is now available in theaters and on HBO Max.