3500 visual effects shots in a show set mostly in a building with white walls and little else? You bet, but to the naked eye you’d have no idea that ILM were doing such incredible work to bring Apple TV+ show Severance to the screen, and to such dazzling effect. Watch the video, then read the article as my fellow ILM.com writer Clayton Sandell digs into the industrious magic behind the hit show.
There are mysterious and important secrets to be uncovered in the second season of the wildly popular Apple TV+ series Severance (2022-present). About 3,500 of them are hiding in plain sight. That’s roughly the number of visual effects shots helping tell the Severance story over 10 gripping episodes in the latest season, a collaborative effort led by Industrial Light & Magic.
ILM’s Eric Leven served as the Severance season two production visual effects supervisor. We asked him to help pull back the curtain on some of the show’s impressive digital artistry that most viewers will probably never notice.
“This is the first show I’ve ever done where it’s nothing but invisible effects,” Leven tells ILM.com. “It’s a really different calculus because nobody talks about them. And if you’ve done them well, they are invisible to the naked eye.”
Severance tells the story of Mark Scout (Adam Scott), department chief of the secretive Severed Floor located in the basement level of Lumon Industries, a multinational biotech corporation. Mark S., as he’s known to his co-workers, heads up Macrodata Refinement (MDR), a department where employees help categorize numbers without knowing the true purpose of their work.
Mark and his team – Helly R. (Britt Lower), Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), and Irving B. (John Turturro), have all undergone a surgical procedure to “sever” their personal lives from their work lives. The chip embedded in their brains effectively creates two personalities that are sometimes at odds: an “Innie” during Lumon office hours and an “Outie” at home.
