Society of the Snow is a brutal, uncompromising telling of one of the most famous survival stories of all time. J.A. Bayona’s film sets a new standard for survival films of real-life tragedies as it’s told with realism and emotion without sensationalism thanks to the incredible work of VFX.

The VFX team discussed their work on the emotional epic with our Artisans Editor, Jillian Chilingerian.

Jillian Chilingerian: Congratulations on the film number one on Netflix. That’s so exciting and of course the shortlist, This film is seared in my mind from the visuals and the sound and the emotions. It just felt like felt so real. When we watch true stories it’s one where I had to remind myself these are not the real people. First I want to get started off with both of you getting involved in the project and doing the research.
Laura Pedro: When we started to learn about this project in 2018, I think it was the first conversation that Felix and I had with Villa de Anza and Sandra Mila, when we realized that to sharing this story, and we’re going to do it in the in the most realistic way. That’s when we started trying to figure out how to make it and how to film without the icing in the snow and in that place in the Valley of Tears and started our research with the production team to try and to figure out which mountain was perfect, or if it exceeds a place where we can shoot and be there.
Félix Bergés: I’ve been skiing all my life and I know more or less a lot of mountains. The Andes is a very particular place, it’s a mountain range that is going from South to North, that is really very strange. The valley of it is near the equator, it’s very cold, it’s 5000 meters high. One of the most similar places is in Spain, the Sierra Nevada. The Sierra Nevada is very normal, that you have a lot of sun is very cold because it’s very high and the only thing is that the duration of the mountains is completely perpendicular, or going from West to to East, and is very small competition within our mountain. The thing is that these are huge.

Jillian Chilingerian: I remember the scenes when they’re going to go explore to find the second half of the plane and then even towards the end when they’re like they go on their journey. The perspective of how gigantic these things they are crossing and it zooms out and you’re like, I don’t know if they’re gonna make it. You are placed in there thinking about distance and how remote the plane crashes.
Laura Pedro: I remember when we traveled there the first time with Juan Antonio Bayona to the Valley of Tears, and we spent three days to arrive at the exactly same point by walking. That’s when we realized that it’s huge and it is not the same right now as it was 51 years ago, there is a different mountain right now. So there is less snow, and it’s easier. But we’re gonna realize that it was incredible the thing that they do.
Félix Bergés: You went with modern equipment, what I imagined is these guys going from Uruguay to Chile with a shirt because it’s summer and they want to be on the beach. This is amazing to live in that moment because they are very young yet they are sportmen, very strong. This is completely a miracle.

Jillian Chilingerian: They were resilient and you can really feel watching it. They spend a very long time in this one place, so how do you figure out the lighting for the time of day, because it helps us process how long it’s been almost like real time of like them waiting it out.
Laura Pedro: We know that we are going to travel to the Valley of Tears to have the real backgrounds because we decided we don’t want to recreate in CG the mountains, we want to have the real mountains. So before traveling there, we developed an application to help the DP and the rest of the crew plan the whole movie. For us, it is which type of picture we’re going to need and which positions in the Valley of Tears so that that application brings us the opportunity to study the light. In this application, we have 3D of the Valley of Tears, or 3d from the Sierra Nevada, and 3D from the second set that we have in 1000 meters in Granada. So that app gives us the opportunity to have this study of the different lights between the light of the Valley of Tears and the light in Spain, where we are going to shoot in January. With Felix, we decided that during this shooting for four weeks in the Valley of Tears, we would to 360 from the place where the plane crashed and the fuselage stayed and we do 360 With HDRI.
Félix Bergés: We made very high-resolution, High Dynamic Range Images and we have very good material because we went into the Valley of Tears before the shooting, so we know that we have to cover more or less everything. We made a plan with the climbers that they spend four weeks working with two or three teams, we made one photogrammetry of the whole Valley with a drone. We went two times in the winter, before the shooting, and then the next winter. In both, we captured different things and finally, we are happy because we have everything.
Laura Pedro: For example, all of the expeditions that they made, all of the backgrounds that you see in the movie, it’s the exact same place where they stop or whether during the expedition when they arrive at the top of the mountain, it’s exactly the same.

Jillian Chilingerian: The plane crash with the sound of the ankles, how was putting that whole thing together because you just really feel the impact of the actors with their faces.
Laura Pedro: Well, the process is the same as for the mountains, we start thinking about how to film a plane crash accident, most realistically. So we start first of all with the survivors, talking to them, trying to understand their feelings and the things that happened to them. After that, we worked with El Ranchito during the previous operationalization of the whole scene, and then with Felix, the special effects supervisor, and the production designer we started thinking about how to film which parts of the plane we were going to need or which machines. That is when we realized that we were going to build three different sets. One set is the whole plane constructed with machines that gave us the first turbulence. The first part of the scene before the crash, it’s 100% real without VFX intervention. The second set that we built, which is a third part of the plane, is constructed on top of the gimbal, which gave us the heavy movements, and also the inclination. The shots were where the seats broke, and the actors came to the camera, we used gravity. We mix a lot of different techniques, we try to figure out how to use the special effects, the stance, the makeup effects, and visual effects, so it makes the whole accident and the last set that we build, it just set on the floor, where we use the dummies, and also the special effects and the rigs and is where we can pull the camera close to the action is that shot where we broke the neck of the women of the legs.
Félix Bergés: Sometimes a mixture of the real face of the actress with a dummy. We are always mixing. This is our business.
Laura Pedro: I think it’s really important to try to have this feeling of a real accident, so that’s why we build these machines where everything goes. The actors are not faking this movement or doing it with the camera. We add the extension of the background, or the CG of the plane crashing in the background, maybe at some point, we add CG to have these extreme and heavy actions with them. We try to find the best way to have this sensation.

Jillian Chilingerian: Coming onto this project of such scale and the intensity and the emotion. Was there anything in it that you found challenging or anything unexpected? How has it been for you with this?
Félix Bergés: The only thing I have to say this is the only thing that was very long. There is a lot of work with J.A. and we have made three this one is a big movie.
Laura Pedro: The difficult thing at the beginning is to have this realism and to be sure that we have everything that we’re going to need at the end for making the visual effects at the end of the shooting. So there is like a lot of pre-production in this movie. So that’s why is there a long, long, long time, being a lot of years

Jillian Chilingerian: This is one of those films that you watch, and you not only like to feel all the emotions because it just feels so real. I’m so happy to see that it’s like the number one film right now and people are talking about it with those practical functionals of realism.
Laura Pedro: Thank you.
Félix Bergés: Thank you.

You can read our review of the film here.