Cinematic visions of the near future are often bleak, but in George Clooney’s “The Midnight Sky” production designer Jim Bissell wanted the stark environments to also have a sense of poetry. The film, set following an undefined global catastrophe, follows a lone scientist (Clooney) as he journeys across the Arctic with a mysterious young girl in hopes of stopping the spaceship Aether from returning to the catastrophe that Earth has become.
For Bissell, who worked closely with cinematographer Martin Ruhe and VFX supervisors Matt Kasmir and Chris Lawrence, the visuals needed to evoke the sense of isolation felt through the narrative.