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How A Low Budget Sci-Fi Movie Revolutionized Visual Effects
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Jul 3, 2025
Ex Machina was a low budget sci-fi movie with ambitions that changed an industry. The visual storytelling within Ex Machina was unlike anything audiences had seen before, and that was due to a world class VFX team and a director willing to take a chance. The painstaking production of Ex Machina may have been low budget, but you can't see it in the final product.
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So we need to break the ice
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Do you know what I mean by that? Yes. What do I mean? Overcome initial social awkwardness
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So let's have a conversation. Special effects have been around since the dawn of movies
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Evolving and pushing the medium forward year after year, they change how we tell and watch stories
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As computer technology advanced, more shots were able to be added to post-production
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by teams of artists in what would be called visual effects, or VFX
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In 2014, one movie used tried-and-true special effects and visual effects to craft a story that not only pushed technology forward
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it pushed how those effects can tell a story. Okay, where do I start
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It's your decision. I'm interested to see what you'll choose. Director Alex Garland rose to fame as a novelist
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in the mid-90s with his debut novel, The Beach, filmmaker Danny Boyle, 28 Days Later
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The tight thriller was heralded for its revitalization of the zombie genre
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and Garland would continue with screenplays pinning the underrated Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dread
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It would be in 2014 when Garland made his directorial debut with Ex Machina
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The story follows a young programmer named Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson, who is tasked by the eccentric CEO of his job, Nathan Bateman, played by Oscar Isaac
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to perform a Turing test on a new AI named Ava, played by Alicia Vikander
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It's when a human interacts with a computer. And if the human doesn't know they're interacting with a computer, the test is passed
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And the three's relationship is the entire linchpin for the movie, Riddled with heady ideas about existence, identity, and choice, they all take a backseat
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to how our three main characters communicate those ideas to one another and to us
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In order to do that, we have to believe in the Turing test. For that to work, we have to believe Ava is a robot
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The real test is to show you that she's a robot and then see if you still feel she has consciousness
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Garland first met visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst on the set of Dread
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Back then, Garland had already started thinking about how VFX could propel a plot
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Working with Whitehurst, the two integrated the action movie staple of slow motion into
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the film's plot, this time with a narcotic called slow-mo that sends the user into hallucinogenic
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state usually taken right before moments of extreme albeit beautifully shot and rendered violence The two wanted to take that VFX plot correlation experience and apply it to their new film
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For that to work, Whitehurst, Garland, and Vikander created one of the film's most iconic AIs
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While this was something that would have been traditionally shot with green screen, there was no green screen, motion capture balls, or dots involved in the shooting of Ex Machina
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Instead, Vikander wore a silver catsuit that closely resembled her robot shoulder line and face
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They shot two plates or takes of every shot with Vikander, once with the actors and another without
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Animators would then meticulously paint the moving robot parts around the real Vikander
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One reason for ensuing the more traditional green screen and motion detectors was simply time
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Setting up and breaking down repeated green screens is incredibly time-consuming on a
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smaller budget movie with a limited shooting schedule. We were making what is actually quite a low-budget movie with a huge VFX element
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and we needed to be very careful about how we shot it
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While the painting itself took an immense amount of time, this was something that could be completed post the film's limited time with the actors
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And those actors were crucial to the film's plot. While the movie is broadly a science fiction story, it is very much on the hard sci-fi line
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a story that is dependent on technology to tell a story about humanity
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It is, at its heart, a morality tale based around questions, debate, and philosophy
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It's closer in line to a movie like Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. That film followed a single juror who refused to vote guilty in the face of jurors who merely
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wanted to carry on with their day. The rest of the movie follows the cast's discussion about the
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case. While that movie used the traditional format of actors at the top of their game
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making us believe in the characters, Ex Machina subtly used its VFX to let the performers act
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their hearts out and then have the VFX artist bring the sci-fi aspect to life. The same holds
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true during the film's Turing test. While Caleb gives the generally accepted modern interpretation
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of a Turing test, the film actually uses Turing's original test, which involved gender. And Nathan
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realizes that gender is important to test this hypothesis with cis Caleb Just like you later in the film that Nathan has modeled
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Ava's face from various erotic searches from Caleb's internet history. For the body, many of the mechanical pieces resemble human anatomy that manages to feel
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familiar or conforming, while still coming across as alien or synthetic. In Garland's modern identity
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of morality and philosophy, he knows that humanity's ideas of love and power can make us blur the lines
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between what we know to be true and what we believe to be true. With Whitehurst and Verkander, Garland
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was able to create an AI that made not only Caleb believe in Ava, but us as well. You feel stupid
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but you really shouldn't because proving an AI is exactly as problematic as you said
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In an interview with The Verge in 2015, Whitehurst said, We didn't want Ava to look obviously like a robot from any other film that people would be used to seeing
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The C-3PO's, the Maria from Metropolis, that kind of thing. I made a rule which I applied to myself as much as anybody else who was on the team working on it
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which was no one is allowed to look at robots. Working from the initial concept art from famous comic book artist and former Dread collaborator Jock
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Ava is both immediately recognizable and disarming all at once. How do we design something that works plausibly as a machine
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but also that you could absolutely believe that someone could form a relationship with
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In that same Verge interview, Whitehurst states that so much of visual effects is psychology more than anything else
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You're looking at what are the cues that we as humans latch onto
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when we look at something that makes it feel right. And it's often those really kind of subtle things
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that help ultimately push it that last few percent to really sell the illusion
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Whitehurst describes a scene in the lab where various parts of Ava were 3D printed in a manner that would actually fit together
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We were also looking at human anatomy at the same time to make sure that, yes, we're building the bones
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but we're going to connect muscles to that. It's the same way it happens in a human being. Contrast that to something like Transformers
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where there are so many indiscernible moving parts and it easy to understand why we look at Ava as something that could be constructed Above all else we believe this robot can exist
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Not far from a new shiny user-friendly Apple product. Helping the VFX along was Vikander's history with ballet
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And the way Vikander was able to move with both grace and small sporadic jerks
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gave the animators a chance to bring to life something we all know isn't human
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but still manages to have a sense of familiarity. Now your micro-expressions are telegraphing discomfort
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I am not sure you'd call them micro. I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable
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It's hard to ignore one of Ex Machina's biggest influences, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
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the modern Prometheus. In another brilliant turn from Garland and Company, instead of the patched together corpses
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of Frankenstein's monster, we have ornate pulsing coils and shining robotics. And that subtitle alone, the modern Prometheus, also reflects in Nathan
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Both are stories about a scientist who believes they are gifting humanity a revelation as important as fire, only to have it spiral out of control
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While the novel rested on the fear of the unknown, Ex Machina applied on the fears of something we know, we just simply don't understand
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The filmmakers again reinforced that idea with VFX by showing us juxtaposition
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Throughout the entire film, it is Vikander's face and hands we see, a constant reminder that there is humanity here pressed against the robot form
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Garland and Whitehurst would continue the method they developed here in their third collaboration, Annihilation
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Throughout that film, we would see protagonists enter a world whose entire concept rests upon the idea of twisted reality
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familiar forms slightly altered into surreal horror. They are clearly playing upon the idea Whitehurst stated as VFX being so tied into psychology
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When we reach the film's climax and we are introduced to another VFX being
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we can't help but feel at once terrified and comforted. No matter where you land on the meaning, it's impossible to argue against the thought and care that you put into using the VFX to punctuate the thesis of the film
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Those films, and what we can only hope will be many more, change the way filmmakers can use VFX
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They are not simply a way to make the impossible real on our screen. They are a means to alter what we think is impossible
#Film & TV Industry
#Science Fiction & Fantasy Films