Meta Plates

Is a plate within a plate that can make more plates a MetaPlate? Who knows, but that’s the name of this test. What’s the Objective? With the rise of Virtual Production, notably LED volumes and a shortage of familiar artists with real-time engine experience, we’ve seen plate material doing a lot of work in these…

Hacked Off

We produced a sequence of shots for the stylish six-part cat and mouse thriller, We Hunt Together from our Visual Effects studio in London. For example, the severed head in Episode 1, as well as providing on-set VFX Supervision for some of the bigger elements in the series. In the first episode, we see Baba,…

Stand out from the crowd

If you need crowds of people to fill a scene, one way to achieve this is to get hundreds of supporting actors in place. The cost of this can add up of course, particularly if they require complex costumes. We needed to create a crowd of approximately 6000 people for the hanging scene in Poldark…

Building Bridges

A typical project for us consists of many exciting challenges. If you read our other posts, you’ve probably realised that we’re not just VFX people. We have knowledge and skills in all aspects of getting that shot and Jericho was no different. We had a vast range of different challenges that you’ll have an insight…

First Man Oscar Win [Opinion]

So why the Oscar win? Considering the category nominees; Avengers, Christopher Robin, Star Wars and Ready Player One, it was a controversial win, no doubt. It’s likely that each of the nominations had well over 1500 VFX shots, several being full CG. Compared to maybe only half of that in First Man. Maybe it wasn’t…

Back to our Roots

When we needed to capture hair at a macro level we tested an old trick but a good one; the practical route. For more about our digital hair work for the same project, check out this post. The world of FX requires a ton of testing. This is where silly ideas become great ideas, it’s…

The All Seeing Arrays

Working with Brownian Motion we’ve helped them develop their multicamera arrays using compositing tools. One might not immediately think of using vanilla NukeX when it comes to the stitching of video footage, but NukeX, with its built-in 3D system, provided a complete toolset for the things we set out to accomplish in our collaboration with Brownian…

Bunker Life

The Alternative Cabinet War Rooms Over the course of 7 days, we joined forces with Subterranea Britannica and FARO to scan and photograph the Paddock Bunker, Churchill’s alternative war rooms. The result is a LiDAR scan of all 50 rooms across two levels, set below a housing estate in North London. The Bunker is full of history,…

Blow Me Up

CGI isn’t always the answer Working together with Asylum SFX, Lexhag developed a computer controlled pneumatic suit for the Netflix show The Innocents. Universally made to fit all the different actors’ shapes and sizes, the under jacket contained all the major muscle groups, which could be individually inflated and deflated to give the illusion that the actor’s body…

Witness the Fitness

Quick, easy and high spec. That was our brief for the Witness system we built. For our recent New Pictures and Netflix production, The Innocents, we needed to build something that we could employ quickly, wouldn’t be intrusive onset and met a particular price point.  Capturing multiple angles, performances or moving objects enables a smoother match-moving…

Vac my Face

A quick one for the records; working upon the recommendation of our friends at Peanut VFX we created some vac formed faceplates for the quick application of tracking markers for a recent project. The process involved taking face casts of each actor, from which plaster positives were made. The plaster was cleaned up and the marker holes…

Ice and Lasers

Iceland is a cool place. Quite literally, it’s a beautiful, harsh, unique place on earth where, it seems, no much lives. We travelled there in search of a mythical Ice Cave in which an artist, Isaac Julien, would make his next works. What did we do? Our key job was to add a giant, wooden, staircase…