Making A Scene: ‘3 Body Problem’ Cast and Crew Break Down the ‘Severance’ Influence, Epic ‘Bugs’ Reveal and What’s Next for the Series

variety.com:

Jack Dunn When series creators David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo first crafted the moment Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) enter the game in “3 Body Problem,” they made it so they “would put on the headset and then there’ll be a moment of black and then they go into the game.” But when they saw the scene cut together, they felt there was “something missing.” So for inspiration, they reached to another popular sci-fi series for inspiration: “Severance.” “We’re actually influenced by ‘Severance’ in the elevator scenes, you know where they have that kind of weird camera effect,” said writer and co-creator Benioff. “We looked up how they did that.

Ours was like, ‘What if their eyes merged together and then came apart again.'” As part of Variety‘s “Making a Scene” Cunningham, Hong, Benioff, Weiss and Woo were joined by “3 Body Problem” visual effects producer Steve Kullback and co-director Minkie Spiro to discuss how they brought the extraterrestrial thriller to life.

One of the biggest challenges for Kullback was the reflective headgear used to enter “3 Body Problem’s” virtual world. While shooting with the headsets, “literally everything is reflected,” according to director Spiro. “The camera, the boom and the crew.” According to Kullback, he and his team shot “a tiled image of every square inch” of the sets to create “a photograph” that could be “reprojected on top of the headset, in the place of all of the crew members and camera gear that appears in the environment.” “I asked, ‘It couldn’t be mate black, wouldn’t that be just as cool?’ But no, they said, ‘It has to be chrome.'” Kullback said. “I do admit — now that it’s done — it looks pretty bitchen.” Another challenge for the crew was.