Yes, it’s finally coming – we’re officially getting close to completing Emergence 2028.
When writer and director Ian Kane first created these characters years ago, the idea was always bigger than simply following them from one scene to the next. The world around them mattered just as much. The city needed neighborhoods that felt as though they had been there for decades, industrial areas that had been used, abandoned, repurposed, and used again, and corporate towers occupied by people living far above the problems unfolding at street level.
A recent post-production boost has given us an opportunity to expand that side of the film considerably.
Two VFX artists are now helping build out different parts of the city and its atmosphere, while editor Matt Taff continues assembling an increasingly complicated collection of footage, effects work, sound, and other material into the finished film. A great deal of what is being added is not intended to call attention to itself. It is there to make the locations feel like parts of the same place and give the audience a stronger sense that life exists beyond the edges of the frame.
The scene pictured here is a good example – operative Violet Keeling (Southie Ballantyne), checks in with biotech executive Revik (Sean Rogers, “The Flash“). Their meeting takes place high above the city, physically and socially removed from much of what’s happening below.
That contrast has always been part of Emergence 2028. At street level, characters move through aging buildings, warehouses, clubs, alleys, and crowded neighborhoods. Above them is another world entirely, occupied by corporations and people with enough power and money to separate themselves from the consequences of what happens below.
As the final pieces come together, we are finally able to show more of the world that was imagined when the project began.
