TechRadar sits down with Reminiscence’s behind-the-scenes team to find out how its flooded world and memory machine were brought to life.
Reminiscence is a movie that provides an intriguing look into our own world’s potential future. Set in the year 2050, the sci-fi thriller follows Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), a Miami-based private investigator whose repurposed army interrogation machine lets people relive any memory they like. When a client called Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) enters Nick’s life, changes it for the better and suddenly vanishes without trace, he attempts to track her down. But Nick’s desperate search through Florida’s flooded streets – a byproduct of a recent natural disaster – becomes more dangerous than he anticipates. Reminiscence’s submerged setting and futuristic technology may seem a long way off, but they’re not. Rising sea levels and the ability to recall our memories aren’t distant possibilities; they’re grounded in real-life science and may be closer to reality than we thought. With Reminiscence out now on HBO Max and in theaters, TechRadar sat down with VFX supervisor Bruce Jones and production designer Howard Cummings to find out how its scenic dystopia was created. We also discuss the real-world experimental technology that inspired Nick’s reminiscence machine and the challenges associated with bringing both aspects to life. From the outset, writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) wanted to craft a world where coastal regions had been partly swallowed by the oceans. Real-world studies have attributed rising sea waters to climate change, but Joy was reluctant to make statements about global warming through Reminiscence’s plot. Instead, a decision was made to focus on how humanity would adjust to living in flooded cities, with an Italian city serving as a blueprint for Joy’s vision. “Lisa’s very visual in her storytelling and she wanted global warming to be the cause of Miami’s flooding,” Cummings explains. “We looked at how people would adapt, rather than abandon, Florida and use it like Venice. So we created a map of Miami with flooded and dry areas, and delineated them as areas where the poor and wealthy lived.” To provide audiences with a clearer picture of its dystopian setting, Reminiscence opens with a three-minute aerial shot that reveals the scope of the flooding. It’s a sequence all the more impressive as Reminiscence wasn’t filmed in Miami. Rather, principal photography occurred nearly 1,000 miles away in New Orleans, Louisiana. How, then, was Miami recreated in such painstaking detail for Reminiscence’s opening vista? As Jones reveals, by using two specific imaging techniques: Photogrammetry and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR). The first, often used by architects, allows individuals to take multiple, overlapping images of objects and recreate them as 3D models on a computer. Meanwhile, LIDAR uses a targeted laser to build an accurate representation of the Earth’s topography. Merging these with aerial footage of Miami enabled the VFX team to reconstruct the city from scratch.
