At the tail end of 2024 I worked as a freelance Houdini FX artist with the excellent folk at Studio AKA on the titles for Chief of War on Apple TV+.

Watch the full sequence at Studio AKA’s site!

I’ve been an admirer of AKA’s work for a very long time but our paths never crossed until then. The interim year was a busy one so I’ve only recently gotten around to popping this up here.

It’s been many years since I first took up Houdini, with my introduction to it being mostly the kind of generalist work I’ve done my whole career. It was a pleasure to be able to flex the FX muscles a little on this particular gig.

As much as the feather cloaks were left to others to figure out, my involvement after layout was working on volumetric smoke, clouds, mist, the terrains such as the one above and a helping of flying ash and embers.

Looking forward to future work at AKA!