From Archive to Production: A Hybrid Workflow with Marble

Overview

For Harlan Coben's Final Twist on Paramount+ and CBS, Promise developed a hybrid production workflow that combined World Labs' Marble, AI-assisted image restoration, artist-led environment creation, and virtual production to recreate ten historic crime scenes that no longer existed.

Rather than replacing traditional filmmaking, Marble became one step in an established production pipeline, transforming archival photographs into immersive 3D environments that artists could refine, expand, and prepare for virtual production.

The Production Challenge

Every episode centered around locations from real criminal investigations. Many of these places had changed dramatically over time or disappeared entirely.

The production team often had only a handful of archival photographs or pieces of historical footage to work from. The images were frequently low resolution, poorly lit, or captured from only a single viewpoint, making it impossible to physically revisit or accurately rebuild the original locations using conventional methods.

At the same time, the environments needed to serve the creative vision of the director and DP. Locations had to support specific lighting, camera angles, and atmospheric treatments, including carefully art-directed night scenes that often went far beyond what was visible in the original archival material.

The challenge was not simply to recreate a location. It was to transform limited historical references into believable, production-ready environments that could be shaped around the filmmakers’ creative needs while remaining faithful to the original places.

A Modern Hybrid Production Workflow

Rather than relying solely on traditional VFX techniques, Promise developed a hybrid production workflow that combined image restoration, Marble, artist-led environment creation, and virtual production.

The process began by restoring and enhancing archival imagery to recover as much visual information as possible. Once prepared, those images were brought into Marble to generate spatially coherent 3D Gaussian splat environments that established the foundation for each location.

These initial reconstructions became the starting point, not the finished product.

Artists then expanded missing portions of each environment, refined geometry, improved materials and textures, corrected inconsistencies, and optimized every scene for production. By starting with a realistic spatial foundation, the creative team could spend more time refining the final environment instead of building every location entirely from scratch.

Below: A VFX breakdown showing how archival imagery was transformed into production-ready environments.

Where Marble Fits

Within the broader production pipeline, Marble served as the bridge between historical reference material and production-ready environments.

Instead of asking artists to manually interpret a collection of disconnected photographs, Marble generated an immersive 3D representation that preserved the spatial relationships of the original scene.

This allowed artists to move into creative refinement much earlier in the process, using Marble's output as a foundation for environment reconstruction instead of treating it as a final deliverable.

The workflow combined:

• Archival photographs and historical footage
• AI-assisted image enhancement
• Marble for 3D world generation
• Artist-led environment reconstruction and refinement
• Virtual production on LED stages
• Traditional cinematography, lighting, and filmmaking

Rather than replacing any part of the filmmaking process, Marble fit naturally into an existing professional workflow, accelerating one of the most challenging stages of environment creation while preserving creative control throughout production.

From Virtual Environment to Final Production

Once the environments were refined, they were optimized for virtual production and displayed on a 16K LED volume.

This allowed host Harlan Coben to perform naturally inside each reconstructed location, with the virtual environments responding in real time to camera movement. Compared with traditional green screen workflows, filming against the LED volume provided more natural lighting, improved interaction with the environment, and a stronger sense of presence for both performers and viewers.

The result was a production workflow capable of bringing audiences into places that could no longer be visited, creating a more immersive way to tell stories rooted in real historical events.

Human Creativity at the Center

One of the defining aspects of this workflow was how Marble complemented existing creative processes rather than replacing them.

While Marble accelerated the creation of immersive environments, every location was shaped by artists, virtual production specialists, cinematographers, lighting teams, and filmmakers who ensured each scene met the creative and technical standards required for broadcast television.

This project demonstrates how world models can support professional filmmaking by giving creative teams a strong spatial foundation while leaving artistic decisions and storytelling firmly in human hands.

Looking Ahead

As virtual production continues to evolve, workflows like this show how world models can become another tool within professional film and television production.

Rather than replacing existing production techniques, Marble gives creative teams a new way to transform limited visual references into rich spatial environments that fit naturally into established pipelines.

This collaboration with Promise demonstrates how Marble can integrate into established production workflows, helping creative teams move from archival imagery to production-ready environments while keeping artists and filmmakers at the center of the creative process.