Gyllenhaal takes Prada to the summit

Creating the world of To The Summit became an expedition in its own right. To capture the film's dramatic landscapes, the production team travelled to Iceland with a stripped-back crew, venturing deep onto remote glaciers by snowmobile and working around rapidly changing conditions. Storms, reduced visibility and unforgiving terrain became part of the process, with the resulting footage forming the foundation for a single studio day with Jake Gyllenhaal in New York, where practical effects, in-camera techniques and visual effects combined to complete the journey.

Do adds “One of the things I loved most about this project was that it genuinely felt like an adventure. In Iceland we captured as much as possible in-camera to give a sense of real scale and texture. Then the New York crew found smart and inventive ways to create practical set extensions and in-camera elements, while the post team elevated and unified everything.”

A post-production collaboration between seek.studio, WeAreFX, and VFX Art Director Eugen Lekh came together for the director’s cut of the film. The core challenge was to make every effect entirely invisible: mountain landscapes, ice caves, and extreme weather built from scratch, then seamlessly stitched into studio footage. The hero technical moment came in relighting Jake Gyllenhaal for the glacial environment. The team generated a normal map directly in 2D space, virtually directing light sources onto the talent to recreate a physically accurate interplay of light and shadow across fabric and hair. The engineering effort remains entirely hidden from the audience, in service of the authentic, high-tech spirit of Prada.