Production & Post Uncovered: Dimension on Mercy (feature)

When Amazon MGM’s Mercy began production, it came with a clear creative challenge: bring to life a high-stakes interrogation set in 2029, centred on a single, claustrophobic space. The Mercy Capital Court is the location for an AI judge investigation of a crime, with actor Chris Pratt playing its subject. The environment had to feel cinematic, futuristic, and completely believable. 

What made it possible was a carefully divided collaboration between Dimension’s content and motion graphics teams, Amazon’s virtual production crew and the VFX partner DNEG, with realtime stage technology and the post-production pipeline working as a unified system.

“We came on early in the production,” explains the content supervisor Johnny Gibson, who oversaw Dimension’s stage asset. “Our scope was the Mercy Courtroom itself, building it out in Unreal Engine and getting it lighting-matched to the physical set. The Amazon team, led by VP supervisor Dan Smiczek, handled the lighting balance, supporting asset alignment, side rooms, and the broader stage environment. There was a clear division of labour, and that clarity made it work.”

The Mercy Capital Court environment was deployed on an LED virtual production stage at Amazon MGM Studios in Culver City. The virtual environment delivered accurate, responsive lighting onto the actors during principal photography, gave performers authentic eyelines and reflections to react to, and allowed the director and DoP to frame shots against a coherent, spatially consistent world. Once the asset was programmed and mapped onto cards within the engine, the Amazon stage team took over timing and integration, replacing the virtual previs scene with the in-situ version so that all lighting could be drawn from the live, newly programmed environment.

Motion design and motion graphics - key storytelling elements

On the motion graphics side, the story of Mercy was as much about design philosophy as it was technical process. For motion graphics producer Caroline Laing and motion graphics supervisor Guy Hancock, the brief was to make the interface itself a character. With another partner designing the UI itself, Dimension’s team was tasked with designing the motion of the holographic UI from the protagonist’s perspective. This narrative device expressed what words and performances alone couldn’t.

“The role of motion graphics in Mercy is huge,” says Hancock. “Without giving too many spoilers, the AI judge shares evidence which is expressed through holographic overlays on screens throughout the film. Our role was to design the motion, the camera movement, as Chris takes in what’s communicated via the overlays. This movement, Chris’ POV, had to carry tension and clarity at the same time. It needed to show his psychological state, while pausing for long enough that the viewer could take in key detail. If we were honing in on a particular detail of evidence, everything else would drop away.”

“The director was keen that the camera movement showed natural, realistic reactions. Slow zooms in to draw audience attention to a detail,” explains Laing. “When Chris’s emotional state is agitated and confused, the camera animation becomes faster, panicky. When we’re tracking a police chase, there’s a high amount of energy applied to the camera moves, simulating the character’s excitement. It becomes a storytelling language in its own right.”

“We were tackling this in post,” Hancock notes. “It was about creating an efficient approach that could work in parallel with the rest of the production; the comp teams, CG teams, all of it running concurrently.” 

To make that possible, the teams built a 3D virtual recreation of the courtroom in Cinema 4D and brought it into Nuke, working alongside the DNEG team Canada. During post-production, the team delivered hundreds of MGFX shots using placeholder cards, working on one scene at a time. The pipeline incorporated LiDAR scanning, USD, Unreal, Cinema 4D, and Alembic: a combination chosen for its flexibility. 

Assets and content could keep feeding in as they were completed, and temporary footage was used wherever needed to meet the actor’s reactions and give the director something to respond quickly and iteratively. This meant the edit could be approved more quickly, locked editorially then handed over to VFX to finalise the design.