Trevor Hogg puts on the VR goggles to interact with an alternative reality and the futuristic events that take place in Prime Video series The Peripheral

The cloaking technology is based on flipping mirrors, with each section of the car treated differently

The Peripheral opens with a boat battle, which indicates that nothing is quite as it appears

Considered to be the forefather of the cyberpunk C genre, speculative fiction novelist and essayist William Gibson envisioned two futures. One takes place in rural America two decades from now, and the other is a VR simulation that may well be the actual 22nd-century London rebuilt from a global catastrophe in The Peripheral, now adapted into a Prime Video series by creator Scott B. Smith and executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.

The digital augmentation for the series was provided by producer and visual effects super visor Jay Wor th and visual effects producer and co-visual effects super visor Mark Spatny. The duo par tnered with Crafty Apes, Rodeo FX, Refuge VFX, BlueBolt, Zoic Studios, Ghost VFX, beloFX, BOT VFX, FutureWorks, Kontrol, Epic Shepherd, Studio 8, and Twisted Media in their ex tensive work.

“There are about 2,500 shots over the eight episodes and we star ted post-production in November 2021, so it took almost a complete year,” notes Spatny. “We had 12 vendors and it was a case of approaching each one and finding out what their capacity was. At the moment most of the visual effects houses are slammed because of the amount of work being done for film and television. Some people would tell us flat out, ‘ We’re booked with 3D but would love to do whatever 2D compositing we can do.’ Others were more in the realm of, ‘We don’t want to do a million lit tle clean-up shots. Just let us take a couple of big sequences. We have a lot of 3D capacit y.’ I went, ‘Great, you get the boat battle or some of the Koids.’”

Robots, staples of science fic tion, were refreshed and referred to as Peripherals and Koids. “It ’s always this idea of how can we create these new worlds that ac tually feel unique, while also still feeling like they’re grounded in something we have,” says Wor th.