Terrence Malick has been designing and working on the film with large-format cameras for over thirty years.
The film was originally intended as a conceptual piece entitled "Qasida", and began production in 1979 before Terrence Malick abandoned the project. It was conceived as a multi-character love story set in the Middle East during the First World War which begins with a prologue set in prehistory. Eventually, Malick removed the W.W.I narrative and the prehistoric prologue became the whole film, with the narrative becoming more metaphorical and involving a prehistoric Minotaur or a "sleeping god" resting in the depths of the water while dreaming about the origins and formation of the universe.
The film actually started shooting in 2003 when renowned nature cinematographer Paul Atkins (who also happened to be the director of photography of the film) alerted the filmmakers that volcanoes were erupting in Hawaii. So, they sent him off to capture some of the most extraordinary shots in the film, as molten lava bursts up under the ocean. One cameraman took the IMAX camera so close to exploding magma that his boots melted.
According to Dan Glass, visual effects supervisor for the film, Terrence Malick was saying that he wanted the feeling that every shot in the film was drawn by a different artist's hand.
The visual effects team of the film were presented with four main visual challenges: (1) creating the astrophysical imagery before the Solar system existed, and then conceiving and visualizing the futurescape of our universe, referencing the latest theories about the destiny of the known universe; (2) representing the protoplanetary disk that formed and condensed to become our star system and the planets it contains; (3) imaging the first unicellular forms of life in all their majesty and motion, which would learn to replicate and form increasingly complex organisms; and (4) reconceiving animals that no longer roam the earth, convincingly blending them with analogue equivalents where they exist today.