The virus.
Sasha Baron Cohen and the Sony team approached us to amp up the graphic sequence depicting the spread of an earth ending virus within the film. The idea is that Penelope Cruz is giving a captured Mark Strong a demo of her highly sophisticated virus module, how it works, when it will happen and its devestating its consequences.
Setting the stakes.
After the first round of design, we came to the conclusion that this sequence was a lot more than just explaining a deadly virus. Penelope explaining exactly how she was going to kill and control the world very precisely set the stakes for the film. Explaining the consequences as a super scientific demo wasnt enough though. We determined with Sasha that what would really sell the sinister nature of Penelopes plan was if we showed a human experiment within the demo that visualized what this virus would do to you the person.
Conceptually we determined that the quickest read on this idea was a timelapse of a human strapped to a gurney and injected with the virus. Using fake proesthetics, make up and a little bit of vfx, we created a quick video showing what the virus would do to an actual human, making the dark plan much much more real for viewers
