How on earth did the makers of The Silent Sea create a crash landing on the moon and make lunar water look so ominous that we had to ask NASA for details? What exactly is CGI and what’s real life? These trade secrets lie with Korean production company Westworld (yes, like the show) — but like Bae Doona’s Dr. Song, we’re determined to get to the bottom of it.

Founded in 2018, Westworld offers everything from storyboards and concept design to on-set supervision and digital creature development. Fans of Korean television may remember their work on Scripting Your Destiny as well as the Netflix series Sweet Home and Mystic Pop-up Bar. 

For The Silent Sea, Westworld VFX supervisor Kim Shin-chul drew inspiration from blockbuster films Ad Astra and Prometheus, as well as Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise. And to visually reproduce the characteristics and properties of the moon’s surface, the team closely referenced images taken by the Apollo 11 space mission. To make each scene look as true to life as possible, Westworld had to ensure that the set they built seamlessly blended with CGI.

The production company also used state-of-the-art LED wall technology in which highly sophisticated LED panels serve as the background for live filming. See them in practice, along with blue screen backgrounds, in the video below, The Silent Sea Before VFX vs. After VFX.

The Silent Sea Before VFX vs. After VFX

Blue screens, whose roots go back to the 1930s, require visual effects to be added after a scene is shot — sometimes after several months have passed or even more. On the other hand, high-resolution LED walls offer live viewing of the background so everyone from the director to the actors can see what the final output should look like. Creating an environment where feedback can be given and acted upon instantly, this practice saves not only time but a hell of a lot of frustration.

While an LED wall adds extreme efficiency to postproduction, the entire VFX process for a science fiction series of this scale still took Kim and his team about a year and 10 months  (including pre-production) to complete. While that’s a pretty long time to wait by any hungry sci-fi fan’s standards, as The Silent Sea proves, it’s worth the wait. And lucky for you, you don’t have to sit tight to devour Westworld’s latest project. High school zombie apocalypse flick All of Us Are Dead is now streaming.