Our Visual Effects team have just completed over 75 complex shots for this exciting, Sci Fi, feature film. Directed by Justin Trefgarne & produced by TSquared Films, this complex thriller looks into a future where time travel is possible via drugs. Obviously, this drug is priceless to any company who can develop & harness this technology, whilst its creators are trying to destroy it.

There were two main areas of VFX involved in the production. A 3D, heads up display & gesture driven control desk had to be created & composited into plates of the actor. One of the main challenges with these shots was that these were not filmed with this specific treatment in mind, so there were many hours roto-scoping involved to adapt the plates to this creative change in direction. The second main area was the time travel effect of the characters who ‘jumped’ through time, which involved them burning up with immense heat, shock waves, smoke & embers. The were also a considerable number of green screen shots, city scapes & clean ups to be done.

We used Nuke as our primary compositor & to deal with the rushes which were delivered in a mixture of colour spaces & filmed on the ARRI Alexa & RED cameras.

The full movie trailer can be view here: ‘NARCOPOLIS‘

In response to tender, we were awarded the Premier League World programme title sequence, against some very stiff competition.  The sequence was conceived, storyboarded & produced by ourselves.

The concept was to liken the inter-club battles to the ‘Clash of the Titans’ using planets & astronomical objects to represent each of the 20 clubs in the Premier League. One of the main challenges was to make the club crests subtle enough to be recognisable, whilst blending with their astral environment and not simply planted on to each planet.

All of the planet textures were achieved by extensive matte painting whilst the 3D animation was created using 3dsMax & Maya. Nuke was deployed to manage the 3D compositing, visual effects & grade.

PLTV

The Premier League commissioned Camouflage to create an on-air identity for their worldwide broadcast service.  We were given an open brief to brand the 24 hour channel that is supplied to its huge number of licensees outside the UK and Ireland.

The simple concept which we called ‘BIG on Football’ looks affectionately at the giant passion that fans have for their football teams, devotion that arguably outstrips many other sports.  Our idea was to take that huge passion, and show the fans paying tribute in an equally huge medium.  Our ongoing series of channel idents play on distinctly British characteristics and eccentricities.

We handled the entirety of concept, storyboarding, pre-production, direction and post production all within our CGI department.  Shooting on Canon C300 & 5D MII cameras allowed us to keep the production moving quickly, with minimal kit and crew.  Cementing this growing side of our business, we have been lucky enough to bring on board some incredibly talented DOPs and sound designers making each of the idents a joy to create.

The Gardener

A gardener is hard at work on a privet hedge outside his house.  As the action moves from close-up to wide, we see that our gardener is actually vying to keep up with the Jones’s on a football-crazy street.

Knitting Circle

A cosy sitting room interior is the scene for a seemingly sedate knitting circle.  Team rivalries start to show, and as the scene changes to an external of the house, and those out-of-control homemade football scarves have decorated and overtaken the entire street.

Competitive Dads

A pair of families enjoy a day at the beach on a warm summer day.  Our pair of dads become a little competitive in their sandcastle building, which soon escalates to monumental proportions in a tribute to their rival teams.

Linesman

A worker paints road markings, happily distracted with thoughts of his team.  In his distracted state he goes off-piste and paints a tribute to his beloved side.  A friendly rival shows up from around the corner, similarly devoted to his own team.

Off Piste

A snowboarder and a skier scout the mountains for the perfect spot for off-piste action.  Launching themselves down the slope we begin to see that their goal is more than winter sports thrills as their carving into the powder begins to paint a mural tribute to their team in the snow.

Crop Circles

A farmer strolls through his field about to make a startling discovery.  His bewilderment at the newly acquired crop circles sends his suspicions skywards, whilst the culprits make a getaway.

Christmas Lights

Late at night a man creeps around his festively family living room with an alternative use for his decorations in mind.

Pixel Post-Its

A square mile high-flier looks out anxiously to the skyline beyond his windows.  Grabbing a stack of post-it notes he begins to cover his office window in various coloured squares…is he going a little mad?   In fact he’s responding to a fellow city workers post-it note mural on an adjacent building.

Allotments

A gardener busies herself to the soundtrack of the dawn chorus.  Over the course of the day we watch her digging, watering, and readying the plot.  All for the benefit of an airborne audience…

Sheep Shifter

Ramblers make their way into the hills, passing a shepherd on their way.  We follow the shepherd and his dog as he moves his sheep around with a particular precision.  The sheep are weaved this way and that, and we rejoin the walkers who have a prime spot to view our shepherd’s work.

Park Patrol

A city park in sun-dappled Autumn colours.  A park keeper taking his leaf-clearing duties with high seriousness appears to be creating military precision patterns with the leaves.

Camouflage provided all of the CGI content for Series III, IV & V. Each episode consisted of a reconstruction of the ordeal  told by a survivor.

Over the 3 series, we were faced with a variety of challenging shots, ranging from inner body full CGI to complimenting the drama plates to match the actual location of each ordeal.  This included lots of scenery enhancements & set extensions to crashing planes, sinking yachts, search helicopters & horrific injuries.

Many plates were enhanced with driving rain, smoke, fog & fire whilst others had CGI fish, birds, bees, sharks & even jelly fish comped in. We also developed a series ‘signature’ aerial pull out from close up overhead shots right up to satellite imagery.

One of the biggest challenges was that there wasn’t any CGI supervision on set due to budegtary restrictions. Instead, we would go through the planned shots with the director & DOP prior to each shoot, to minimise the chance of unusable plates.

This was one of our earlier commissions for documentary giant Darlow Smithson Productions. ‘Fighting the Red Baron’ was a 90 minute programme for Channel 4 in which two modern day Red Arrows pilots replicate the challenges of WW1 aerial combat.

Our role involved matching 3D aircraft into filmed footage from real bi-planes, and populating squadrons of planes for large air to air battle scenes. We used a super slo-mo effect to show the synchronisation of onboard machine guns and propellers on these remarkable aircraft, bringing to life the details of these terrifying missions.

We were approached to create the visual effects for a sci-fi short film, ‘Defining Fay’, which takes on the giant concept of commodifying  a person’s subconscious.  Involved from the outset, we provided vfx supervision on location shoots, and subsequent  set-extension and set- replacement in post production.

These crucial shots, set in a corporate facility in the near-future, make up the climax of the film . We replaced part of the filmed location with a hangar sized 3d set. The plates were match moved and then we designed and built a 3d environment upon which we could composite our actors, shot on green screen.

Further CGI was required to composite liquid effects filmed in a cloud tank, plus we created medical style motion graphic elements and composited these onto laptop screens in the film.

The end result produced a genuinely chilling environment to compliment the film’s central theme.

We were commissioned to create a large number of photo-real, battle scenes, which depicted the final minutes of HMS Coventry, which was sunk during the Falklands War on the 25th of May, 1982, by Argentine Aircraft.

The entire content of the shots were built in 3D, which included models of HMS Coventry, HMS Broadsword & the Skyhawk aircraft.  For the water, we experimented with a new fluid & ocean dynamics system, which we used to create the realistic bow waves & ship wakes. Some serious number crunching went into calculating the water movement around the ships!

One of the biggest challenges was the length of the shots. The client wanted to play out the bombing runs from several miles out, to the point of impact & then be able to view these from multiple POVs. We supplied VFX supervision on the reconstruction drama shots of the Argentine pilots which were used to intercut with the CGI sequences, to give a real sense of build up to the final strike on the Coventry.

The length of the shots, the many layer passes & the massive amount of data which was required per frame for the water movement, really put our pipeline & renderfarm through its paces!

Camouflage provided all of the CGI content for the ISBA Series III, IV & V.

Perfect Storm was the grand finale of the 16th episode of series V.  We were faced with over 120 VFX shots, involving huge waves, helicopters ships & adverse weather, all for a very restrictive budget & lead time.

We supplied VFX supervision whilst filming. Previz & rough compositing of drama plates were produced on-set as soon as the shots were available from the ARRI Alexa during filming.

3DSMax & Maya were used to create the 100 foot CGI waves and Nuke was used to handle the Log-C workflow, and for all the keying & compositing.

This investigative documentary on the sinking of the Costa Concordia had to be turned around in double quick time, before the story went cold and before rival documentaries hit the screens. However, a client like Discovery Channel meant compromising quality was not an option.

We used CGI to recreate the Cruise Liner and illustrate the moment of impact, simulating the rock ripping through the hull underwater in the dark. There were also a number photo-real shots of the ship cruising at night & some with the lights failing as power generators were overcome with sea water.

To augment the Photo-real shots, a number of stylised CGI explainers were created showing the ship’s course, location of damage & the progress of the ship flooding, which were used throughout the documentary to demonstrate how the disaster occurred and what happened in the terrifying aftermath.

Marking the end of an era in aviation, this documentary charted the rise and fall of the iconic aeroplane Concorde. Our work helped illustrate, in detail, the sequence of events surrounding the devastating crash of flight AF 4590 in 2000 which contributed to the plane’s withdrawal from service.

We recreated the moment when the plane’s tyre split and the subsequent explosions, to illustrate one theory on how the crash occurred. We matched archive footage of Concorde and replaced this with a CGI prototype of the plane. A 3D environment of Paris airport was built and used as background plates for the reconstruction drama in the plane’s cockpit, setting the scene for the fateful event.

The biggest challenge for this production was the fluid dynamics process used to create the realistic inferno from the damaged engine & fuel tanks.

Imagine being asked to visualise the workings of the mind of the world’s most famous scientist. That was the challenge facing us when Darlow Smithson asked us to be part of this ground breaking series, “Stephen Hawking’s Universe”, for Discovery Channel. The first series explored the subjects of Aliens, Time Travel and finally, The Story of Everything!

Our CGI and VFX  produced a visual feast, traversing an extreme scale of elements, from analysing subatomic particles through to sequences travelling through our galaxy, to Mars, past the moons of Jupiter to ex solar planets, light years from Earth.  As well as attempting to visualise the mysteries of the universe, we had the, arguably greater, task of producing innovative ways to represent the thoughts of Stephen Hawking himself, through thoughtfully presented reconstruction and beautiful visual effects.

Initially brought onboard as a lesser CGI contributor, we were soon being utilised for many more shots than originally planned, due to our creativity, fast turnaround abilities & cost effectiveness to make the budget go further. Ultimately, we delivered well over half of the VFX content for the series!

Following the success of this first series, for which we received the huge accolade of being nominated for an Emmy Award in Visual Effects, we were commissioned for a second series.

Building on our success from the previous, Emmy nominated, series,  we were commissioned to work on the VFX for the second series of Stephen Hawking’s Universe. Once again, a three part series covering The Theory of Everything, The Meaning of Life and The Grand Design?

A similar workflow to the first series was used & re-use of assets & staff was paramount to keep costs down. As with the first series, the range of VFX shots was incredibly varied from sub atomic particles to visualising singularity. Many hours were spent with fluid dynamics systems which were best suited to these totally organic visualisations & once again, we ended up delivering the majority of the CGI content across the series.

Working closely with the directors & producers was essential and we supplied VFX supervision on a number of shots & locations.