Together
Australian writer-director Michael Shanks’ indie horror Together is a scream-worthy, mind-warping descent into love, control, and the grotesque side of codependency. Starring real-life couple Alison Brie (Millie) and Dave Franco (Tim), the film follows a fractured pair retreating to the countryside in search of healing—only to be confronted by a supernatural force that binds them in ways they never imagined.
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. Framestore worked on two pivotal sequences that shape the film’s trajectory, crafting a haunting visual narrative that is disturbing, inventive, and unforgettable
Love, Fear and Flesh Merged
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—a grotesque choreography that eventually halts with a dose of muscle relaxants.
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. Among the most challenging shots was a haunting close-up of their eyes fusing—eyelids stretching, lashes knitting together.
A moment that demanded both technical precision and an unnerving elegance.
The merging effect drew on an eclectic mix of references. Shanks cited the final dance in Luca Guadagnino’s reimagining of Suspiria for its lyrical-meets-tormenting energy, and pulled disturbing visual cues from The Thing, The Blob, and Lovecraft Country. Polish surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński’s skeletal, nightmarish paintings informed the look of the bodies, while Framestore's work on Men was also loosely referenced. Ultimately, though, Together called for something more intimate and emotionally grounded.
The Beauty and Brutality of Becoming One
Creating the body-horror spectacle of Together came with its own set of formidable, flesh-twisting challenges. “Each shot demanded a bespoke approach, with sequences filmed using the real actors as a foundation,” notes Simmonds. The team was tasked with seamlessly merging live-action footage with extreme anatomical transformations — a delicate balance of realism and surreal distortion.
Shanks often pushed for more grotesque bone pops and unnatural contortions.
“He’d ask us to rework on-set performances to intensify the physicality and emotional tension.” This meant full-limb replacements and animation that had to remain tightly anchored to the actors’ original movements—no small feat given the human eye’s sensitivity to anatomical inconsistencies."
One of the more challenging shots was a lingering macro close-up of Millie and Tim’s eyes merging—a moment where their eyelids gently connect and their lashes intertwine like threads. The visual needed to strike a delicate balance between anatomical realism and a surreal, dreamlike quality, all while holding up to the clarity of 4K resolution and the brightness of daylight. “Finding the right balance between realistic anatomical detail and what looks 'right' for the shot was often a process of trial and error,” says Simmonds.
The team overcame these hurdles with a multi-pronged, layered approach. Precision-crafted digi-doubles were developed with accurate pore-level skin detailing, body hair, and real-world lighting behavior using Framestore’s proprietary renderer, Freak. But capturing anatomical realism wasn’t enough—each muscle flex and skin stretch had to be directable. “Our character pipeline, grounded in true anatomy, had to be unpicked and rebuilt to accommodate supernatural movement that still felt grounded,” explains Simmonds. “Skeletons had to be animated with constraints, but also be breakable; muscles and fascia had to ripple and react in unnatural yet believable ways.”
“To manage the complexity, we broke the simulations into modular layers,” explains Simmonds. “This approach let us sculpt and animate each anatomical element—muscle, fascia, and skin—individually, while also providing tailored data to the animation, FX, lighting, and compositing teams. Our FX lead, Steve Oakley, spearheaded custom techniques using Vellum in Houdini, which gave us the flexibility to craft high-frequency skin wrinkling and bone shifting with artistic control. The lighting and compositing teams received a buffet of passes, shaders, and renders they could blend to enhance or dial down specific effects, enabling speedier iterations and finer creative tuning.”
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.
