- [Shawn] It's this very grounded, emotional story.
But the visuals are filled with scale and spectacle.
- It's beautiful, it's adventurous.
It's very heartfelt.
- You were the best part all along.
- We're about to go behind the FX of "The Adam Project."
- "Adam Project" is an adventure
that is at its heart, deeply emotional.
What if you could go back and revisit your own history?
A time travel movie that was less about saving the world
and more about saving yourself.
- First of all, none of that was there.
So you have to imagine all of these things.
- [Shawn] This backyard was built in a hockey stadium
and we extended the woods behind digitally.
- So the other Adam
has a weapon that we call the Mag-Cyl.
- You wanna see something cool?
(Mag-Cyl whooshing)
- That's a lightsaber, dude.
- Quiet now.
- So I actually redesigned this Mag-Cyl many times
so it wasn't just a beam of light.
That was an ongoing design process
that's lasted all the way through post production.
- The handle was like practical.
Of course in post-production
we replaced even the handlebar
because we added some details and LED screen.
And then of course the Mag-Cyl was all CG in every shot.
- Rather than creating their kind of acrobatic choreography
in edits, I wanted it to be real.
- While we were rehearsing it,
we didn't really have that much time.
We were in the middle of the pandemic
and we were given very little time to do many things.
- If you have actors like Ryan and Zoe Saldana,
they're so good at this action stuff.
To give them choreography like this
and to see them pick it up so fast,
as a director, that's a luxury.
(dynamic music)
- There was no real driving.
They are on a blue screen stage
and everything else has been composited.
When our hero cut off from the main road again to the forest
that was very challenging
because the forest wasn't as dense as we see in the movie.
When you deal with like vegetation and natural environment,
they have to seamlessly blend
with a practical plate with a moving camera.
So it was tricky.
Big challenge together, that sequence.
- We have this idea of what if these time soldiers
are on weird like surfboard devices
that fly through the air.
My stunt coordinator, Brian Smrz,
astonished me by saying, no, we can really do that.
We're gonna find actual guys who can ride these surfboards
on these cables that we're gonna string through a forest.
- We shot probably maybe seven
or eight plates with the stunt on wire.
- Half of those time soldier surfers
are real guys doing real stunts.
And that coexistence of the digital and real
helps sell the reality of the sequence to the audience.
(dramatic music)
- I know you wanna touch all the pretty buttons
with your sticky little child fingers.
- It is really fricking hard to design gadgets,
and time travel aircraft, and weaponry
that doesn't look like a lot of other movies.
- Well, the design of the ship, because it's a jet,
we're in the future, but in not too far,
and so we didn't want to do something
that was too futuristic.
The exterior of the jet is always in CG.
We had built a cockpit where they could sit and act.
But even then, a lot of the detail that you see
on the side, on the backseat, were all added in CG.
The moment when young Adam, there is that zero-G effect
and young Adam is floating up in the air,
two shots he was on wires.
So basically his legs were like pulled up by wire
that we painted out.
But there is one shot where
he literally had to feel like floating.
So we had CG legs, and moved them a little bit,
and give that zero-G feeling.
The platform where they walk on,
and some of the computer, that's all practical.
But otherwise, everything else was all CG.
A lot of the inspiration came from
the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.
So if you see the central core,
some of the details are actually really like
taken from the particle accelerator.
There is a wide shot that we see the whole lab
and we see a young Adam fighting with time soldiers.
There was an actual stand that we did,
again wire removal.
It was a complex scene with a lot of elements.
The glass breaking, sparks.
It was like a big, big sequence.
- Punch that.
- Oh yeah.
- I hope that it is kind of a treat
and a delight for the eyes.
But I also hope that there's some kind of experience
for the heart because I love movies that do both.
(gun booming)
- That was awesome.
- Make sure to check out "The Adam Project"
now streaming only on Netflix.
(dramatic music)