Simon Stålenhag is a world-renowned artist and world-builder. His retro-futuristic paintings are the inspiration for Amazon’s original series Tales from the Loop.

To translate Stålenhag’s paintings of 1980s Sweden for television, Amazon Studios employed innovative visual effects, custom constructed the set’s interiors, and shot the exteriors in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The X-Ray team turned to The Endless Co. to visualize this production process in virtual reality, connecting the sets to Stålenhag’s original canvases.

We first shot each of the show’s sets in 360° video. Then for three months, we trained an artificial intelligence tool to paint like Stålenhag, transforming each video into a virtual reality painting.

In the final behind-the-scenes cut, each set is shown in live action VR before fading into into our AI’s painting. The project completes the TFTL stylistic loop: from painting, to screen, back to painting.

The 360° project was released on Amazon Prime Video’s VR platforms, offering an exclusive behind-the-scenes glimpse into Tales from the Loop and its artistic inspiration.