VFX PARIS HAS FALLEN
A terrorist attack hits the streets of Paris and MI6 protection officer Vincent Taleb finds himself thrown into the middle of a sinister plot. Paris Has Fallen , now streaming on Amazon, brings the intense action of the Has Fallen movie franchise to the small screen, centred on Taleb’s efforts to protect the French Minister of Defence from a terrorist threat. For Vine FX, the series presented a significant challenge: balancing the complexity and scale of its demanding visual effects. “This is one of the biggest projects we’ve taken on,” managing director Laura Usaite shares. “It’s a gripping story filled with incredible sequences, great CG and plenty of
Vine FX delivered over 1350 shots for Paris Has Fallen – the biggest job yet for the Cambridge- based VFX studio. We get the lowdown
visual effects work. The team did an amazing job to blend all of that together so it’s genuinely hard to tell where the live action ends and VFX begin.” Paris Has Fallen features Vine FX’s largest VFX shot count to date, utilising distinctive 2D and 3D elements including environment extensions, aeroplanes, dynamic driving sequences and explosive action. The enhancement of practical set builds with custom Parisian environment extensions played a vital role in shaping the show’s unique aesthetic that balances both realism and visual excitement. Amid all that are some intense shootouts and clashes; drama elevated to new heights by the VFX. THE ART OF CG What makes complex sequences more manageable is good reference material. “There’s a scene where the characters run across a roof and jump into a hovering helicopter,” says Jake Newton, CG generalist at Vine FX. “The production team had done a great job building a rig with a partial helicopter on a green- screen stage. It gave us a good frame of reference when it came to replacing the rigged vehicle with a fully CG one.” Several shots needed almost an entire post-production rebuild, so the Vine FX team had its work cut out. In one specific shot that required this, a terrorist walks through a corridor, punches out a window and prepares to fire a shot across the embassy courtyard square. This might sound simple, but the shots had to be very specific as the sequence itself was recorded on a green-screen stage while the exterior elements were filmed on location, meaning the matching of angles had to be seamless.
BLOWN OUT OF THE WATER While no easy task, Vine FX crushed the explosive effects on the show
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