Looking Up traces an engineer and his son over three decades and ends with the son stranded aboard a spacecraft after debris damages its antenna. A re-creation of the major 1998 flood and roughly seven minutes of the son's spacewalk to repair the antenna were two sequences that went beyond what the crew could build on a set. For the flood, the crew built a real dam over 50 days and kept working through the rain. VFX supervisor Jiang Chao's team extended the results digitally. The space sequence required even more. After testing a physical spacesuit rig, the production found that the suit and actor together weighed over 100 kilograms on wires, too heavy to simulate weightlessness, so it rebuilt everything past the actor's face in CG instead. The team said it borrowed this method from Gravity and a Russian space film. Eight visual effects studios divided the film's roughly 800 shots, four Chinese, two Russian, one Ukrainian and one South Korean, with the Russian teams handling most of the space work. Chumak worked on the film as a DMP and concept artist at PostModern Digital.
