Tag Archives: Netflix

Season 6 of The Crown – Breaking down the VFX.

I’ve been fortunate enough to keep working with Rumble VFX for a while now, recently completing a couple dozen shots on Season 6 of The Crown, the final instalment of Netflix’s favourite. Our work, alongside Framestore’s, has been nominated for a BAFTA Craft Award!

See the full breakdown of what Rumble did in the video below and on the Rumble site here The Crown, Season 6 – Rumble VFX

Heraldic Banners

I began this stint on The Crown making many heraldic banners for St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, filmed on location in York Minster. The real chapel has many heraldic items which you can read about here. Of all the heraldry in the real chapel, the banners are visually the most impactful.

From a technical perspective, each banner is connected to a point on a line. Each point has variables to define the angle the banner droops at, plus some colour variance. A vellum cloth solution is applied to all flags at once in Houdini, with the fringing being extruded from the edge of the resulting mesh.

As I knew the order of flags, and indeed gaps between, were subject to change I renamed all the textures and shaders such that they’d pull in flag_1 textures for the first flag, flag_2 for the 2nd etc. This afforded the flexibility to merely rename the textures to change the layout.

Diana

The investigation into Diana’s death took a very long time, wrapping up practically a decade afterwards. As part of a montage surrounding the crash investigation, we see a computer simulation of the car passengers during their moment of impact. To give the impression of a ragdoll-like movement inherent in these things I used a ragdoll solver within Houdini on characters with very basic wireframe appearance, sat within a model of the Mercedes.

Many different simulation systems in 3D share a common trait – one tweak to a shot can change the whole thing, with characters falling the wrong way, leaping out their chair through the sunroof or slapping each other in the face. There were a couple of occasions where the motion appeared too violent, even given the wireframe appearance. With each revision we lost more and more visual detail, dropping frames to give it more of a caching computer simulation look and less of an emotional re-enactment.

Half a Dimension Lost

An odd concept I first read about a decade ago is 2.5D, that is to say a 3D look made in 2D. As I was tracking a few shots for a sequence of princes Harry and William having fun in Botswana I decided to drop in a temporary background in Nuke as a test. It made sense to use the digital matte painting provided and after a few tweaks and advice from others I realised that projecting that on to geometry in Nuke wasn’t so tricky. All my Botswana shots were Nuke scanline composites, not 3D renders. To me it pays to know a few little tricks involving multiple software. I’m hired to produce the end result not a convoluted Houdini scene nobody except wizards can understand.

My work has seen me do many things in many ways – see other projects here.

The Crown Season 5 at Rumble VFX – Period Set Extensions on Beautiful Plates

Before the late Elizabeth II passed and her son was coronated, I was a CG lead at Rumble VFX on Season 5 of The Crown for Netflix.

See the full breakdown of what Rumble did in the video below and on the Rumble site here The Crown, Season 5 – Rumble VFX:

For me, there was a lot of set extension work to do including a recreation of the famous 90s neon signs at Piccadilly Circus. Naturally, being The Crown, there were also ground level, rooftop and aerial shots of Windsor Castle. I created a dilapidated look for Villa Windsor (Mohamed Al Fayed’s gift to The Queen) and was even called upon to replace an errant non-royal yacht. (How dare the late Steve Jobs leave it in shot!)

Work on the show took lots of hours of research and meticulous attention to detail, creating 3D in Houdini, projections in Photoshop, painting up in Substance Painter, rendering in Redshift.

A challenge for me is that I really enjoy the show and wanted to work on it for years, so ended up treating each shot as if it was my last. At one point I was dreaming of various tones of wall in the shots of Windsor Castle. What helped immensely and stopped me painting myself in to a corner was the exceptional production team whose feedback and documentation of the shoots was on point.

The yacht was a peculiar beast. Yachts are often very smooth, white, shiny, looking like fresh CGI frankly. With this being an HDR project I had to make sure we had details that were matching the plate, even out of the range of the SDR monitors most of us work with daily. When doing my rough comps I knocked the exposure of everything down to check it matched, then brought it up again.

One aspect of this project that really helped is the mountain of photos out there on the web. I’m really grateful for those of you who visited Piccadilly in the 90s with a camera or indeed the millions who’ve documented Windsor and the show’s Windsor, Burghley House over the years!

Set work is just one string to my bow – see other projects here.