What Dreams May Come

Vincent Ward adapted Richard Matheson’s 1978 novel and built its afterlife out of paint, with an image that genuinely behaves like paint. Effects supervisor Nicholas Brooks describes the method as optical flow borrowed from machine vision: a brush stroke was generated for every pixel and carried to the next frame, so the paint slides as the camera moves. The landscapes were also lidar scanned, and the depth information helped the transformation sit in the shot. The look of heaven comes straight out of art history, one of Ward’s starting points being Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon. Hell is made of other material entirely, including a passage in which Williams walks across a sea of living faces. Those sections were shot not on a stage but inside the hull of the decommissioned carrier USS Oriskany at Mare Island in Vallejo. The Academy gave the picture its visual effects award. Eugenio Zanetti’s production design was nominated in art direction, where Shakespeare in Love took it. A good fit if you are curious what walking inside a canvas looks like when the paint smears underfoot, and are content to let the story arrange itself around those sequences. Not for viewers who would rather not sit with suicide and the death of children right now.