VFX Breakdown: Along Came Ruby — visual effects and pipeline with a Hollywood colorist

The project and the team

Along Came Ruby is a sci-fi short film directed by Riccardo Suriano, shot in Sacramento and set in a post-apocalyptic world. Ruby, an 18-year-old, crosses a devastated landscape searching for her brother. Along the way she meets a mysterious elderly woman — and discovers that past and future are closer than she thought.

I've been collaborating with Riccardo for a long time. On this project I handled the visual effects. Color grading was done by Walter Volpatto — a Hollywood colorist with credits on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Dunkirk, Megalopolis, Green Book, Interstellar. An Academy Member and consultant to the Science and Technology Council. Cinematography by Joey Katches, editing by Bryan A. Mackenzie.

If I had the opportunity to work with Walter, the credit goes to Riccardo. His vision for the film and his quality standards led to building a team of that caliber even on an independent short.

The scene: when past and future touch

The film's key moment is the encounter between young Ruby and old Ruby in the same physical space. Past and future overlap, spacetime bends. The two versions of the same character look at each other, approach each other, touch — and the energy of that contact is visible, physical, real.

The challenge was creating an effect that felt believable without looking generic. We didn't want the usual blue circular portal — we wanted something that looked like a fracture in space, organic, unstable, alive. Something the audience would feel before understanding it rationally.

Preparation: references and shared vision

Before touching After Effects, Riccardo and I spent time talking. We watched films and series with time manipulation sequences, analyzed what worked and what didn't, discussed the tone we wanted. References ranged from Arrival to Tarkovsky's Stalker — not to copy, but to understand the principle: the best effects are those the audience feels before seeing.

We weren't looking for a spectacular effect — we were looking for an effect that served the story. This phase is often undervalued. When a director and a VFX artist are aligned on the vision before starting, the technical work becomes much more efficient. You're not trying to interpret a vague direction — you know exactly where to go.

The Rome-Hollywood pipeline: DaVinci Cloud and EXR

Here's what makes this project special from a technical standpoint. Color grading was in Walter Volpatto's hands in Los Angeles. I was in Rome. We worked on the same timeline in DaVinci Cloud.

The workflow worked like this: Walter applied his color on the timeline. I took the scenes requiring visual effects from the timeline in EXR format — a format that preserves all metadata, including color information. I worked on the effects in After Effects, exported back to EXR and re-uploaded to the shared timeline. Walter swapped the clips and his color remained intact — no nodes lost, no information degraded.

This is possible because EXR is a floating-point format that maintains the full dynamic range and project metadata. Had we worked with ProRes or H.264, each pass would have compressed the image and destroyed information. With EXR, the VFX pass is transparent — as if the effect had always been there.

We tested the pipeline before starting the actual work. A test on a simple scene to verify that the EXR roundtrip worked without issues — export, processing in After Effects, reimport, color verification. Everything went smoothly. When the pipeline is solid, you can focus on creativity.

The effects: creating a believable spacetime

For the sequence effects I used After Effects and Maxon One. The goal was creating a spacetime fracture with physical qualities: energy, instability, light behaving anomalously.

The final effect is a combination of layered elements: spatial distortions in the air, luminous particles floating like dust in a sunbeam, lightning-like energy discharges that manifest when the two Rubys approach each other, chromatic aberrations and lens flares suggesting interference on the film's "emulsion" itself.

Every element was hand-animated — no presets, no one-click plugins. When you use pre-packaged elements for effects like these, the result is immediately recognizable as "stock effect." To make it believable you have to build it from scratch, layer by layer, and integrate it with the scene's lighting and color.

The most delicate moment is when their fingers touch and energy discharges between the two hands. That lightning between fingers had to feel real — it needed to follow the hands' movement, react to the contact, have coherent physical behavior. I animated it frame-by-frame for the most critical moments.

Beyond the main spacetime scene, I worked on other effects in the film: a TV screen deteriorating, removal of objects from the set and other clean-up work that served the narrative.

The hardest shot

There's a sequence where Ruby is in the foreground and behind her space deforms. The camera is moving, she's moving, the environment is the interior of the shelter — wood, objects, shadows. Everything is moving.

I had to rotoscope Ruby frame by frame to separate foreground from background, then apply distortion only to the background while keeping the foreground intact. Tracking had to be perfect because any error would be immediately visible — the human face is the first thing our brain checks.

The result: nobody notices the effect as an "effect" — they see a scene where something strange is happening to the air behind Ruby. Exactly the goal.

Working with a colorist at that level

Walter Volpatto has graded some of the most visually memorable films of the past twenty years. Working on the same timeline as someone who has colored Star Wars and Dunkirk gives you a very clear perspective on what quality means at that level.

For my VFX, this meant I couldn't afford approximations. The effects had to integrate seamlessly with cinematic-level color — if I got the luminance, saturation or color temperature wrong, it would be immediately obvious. The EXR pipeline was essential precisely for this: it allowed me to work in the same color space as Walter, without conversions that would have introduced errors.

What I learned

Test the pipeline before you start. No matter how confident you are it will work. A complete roundtrip test — export, processing, reimport, verification — costs an hour and can save a hundred.

Time spent in preparation with the director is never wasted. The hours Riccardo and I spent watching references and discussing the effect's tone translated into a linear production process, with no second-guessing or mid-course direction changes.

Less is more. The first versions of the effect were too obvious. Riccardo was right to ask me to pull back — the effect works better when it's at the edge of perception, when the viewer isn't sure what they saw.

Format matters. EXR made a Rome-to-Hollywood collaboration possible without quality loss. The format choice is a creative decision, not just a technical one.

The film is available on YouTube and Film Shortage. You can see my work in the portfolio case study.

Learn more about my VFX services or my approach to integrated post-production.

Credits: Director Riccardo Suriano — Cinematography Joey Katches — Color Walter Volpatto — VFX Piero Perilli — Editor Bryan A. Mackenzie — Starring Alexandra Boulas and Liz Kastner.