Receiving praise from audiences following its Sydney Film Festival premiere in June, Australian thriller In Vitro is one to watch for upcoming release. Telling the story of an animal breeding experiment gone wrong in a near future dystopia, the film has been praised for its raw story and impressive visuals.

Working with the film’s creators to deliver this cinematic splendor was Australian VFX house Future Associate, whose team provided both CGI animals as well as digital mattes to help achieve the director’s vision for the film.

With the plot centering around the subject of cloning cows, Future Associate’s 3D animal doubles were crucial in helping to tell the film’s central story. Working with pre-shot footage, Future Associate were tasked with creating an exact digital replica of a real life cow, allowing filmmakers to complete scenes where working with the animal would have been too impractical.

“The sci-fi story involves cow clones,” explains Future Associate’s Visual Effects Supervisor Lindsay Adams. “The brief was to create a CG version of the cow that was cast in the film, which could then be used many times across different environments, whether that be indoors, outdoors, or in a tank of water.”

This model proved invaluable for the filmmakers, being deployed in a range of different ways, from filling out the back of shots, to replacing a stand-in prop cow that had been used in a number of takes.

One key shot – requiring the cow to appear in a practically shot water tank – posed an interesting challenge for animators, requiring a combination of CG work, fluid simulation and compositing to complete the visual filmmakers had in mind.

“For the water tank shot we took a systematic approach,” explains Adams. “First the footage was digitally tracked with virtual cameras, and proxy geometry was fashioned for both the tank and the surrounding environment. We then could simulate the water, making lots of small adjustments until the liquid’s behavior closely matched the water in the original footage.”

The animated CG cow could then be used as a “collider” for the virtual water in 3D software Houdini, allowing the simulated fluid to realistically interact with the character as it thrashes in the water. For extra realism, white-water foam was also simulated along the points where the virtual water was most active.

With so many moving parts, combining these elements then required a keen eye for detail, with animators using a combination of rotoscoping, mask renders, and warping of the original plates to help seamlessly blend the real and CG water.

Adding a final bit of flair to the scene, animators also selectively added a few 2D splash elements flying around the shot, to really sell the effect.

On top of CG work, Future Associate’s animators also provided digital set extensions for the movie, helping to enhance the near-future timeline of the movie where locations feel familiar yet uncanny to audiences. Examples include the schoolyard scene depicted below, where animators made a number of changes to the footage, ranging all the way from adding signs and changing the decal on a car, to inserting entire buildings in the background.

You can watch the full breakdown of Future Associate’s work on In Vitro below: