Post-production uncovered: Vine FX on Paris Has Fallen (Prime Video)

Vine FX has revealed the work that went into producing over 1,350 VFX shots for Prime Video series Paris Has Fallen.

Set in the …Has Fallen universe and produced by StudioCanal, Millenium Media and G-Base, the show follows MI6 protection officer Vincent Taleb after a terrorist attack sees him thrown into the middle of a sinister plot. For Vine FX, it was the VFX house’s largest shot count to date, with the work including  2D and 3D elements such as environment extensions, aeroplanes,  dynamic driving sequences, and explosive action.

“This is one of the biggest projects we’ve taken on,” said Vine FX MD, Laura Usaite. “It’s a gripping story that’s filled with incredible sequences, some great CG, and plenty of visual effects work. The team here did a great job to blend all of that together so it’s genuinely hard to tell where live action ends and VFX begins.”

Good reference material was key to making such a large workload manageable. “There’s a scene where the characters run across a roof and jump into a hovering helicopter,” said 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 entirely rebuilding during post-production, including a specific shot that used a full CG rebuild was when a terrorist walks through a corridor, punches out a window and prepares to fire a shot across the embassy courtyard square. The shots had to be very specific as the sequence itself was filmed on a green screen stage and the exterior elements were filmed on location, meaning the matching of angles had to be seamless.

“The angle of the corridor shot didn’t match the exterior plate,” said VFX supervisor, Maxwell Alexander. “We opted to rebuild the embassy courtyard in CG and composite the environment behind with matte paintings so we could realise the geography of the story. It’s one of those innocuous sequences that has a lot more visual effects work than an audience might realise.”

“The show is full of complex camera moves,” added Usaite. “What makes the shots incredibly successful is how we integrate with the live action footage.” For sequences filmed outside, including leaps from buildings, there was no simple green screen to remove. The team at Vine FX rebuilt buildings in CG, adding DMP and city details in the background to recreate Paris authentically.

“We developed a method of filming backplates across Paris with a 360-degree camera,” said Usaite. “It meant that we could take a new, innovative approach that proved to be incredibly successful – especially when handling a huge volume of driving shots.”

There are nearly 200 driving shots in Paris Has Fallen, all filmed against green screens. This, normally, would require either stock assets or extensive camera rigging to film live-action plates. Vine FX recommended mounting a 360-degree field-of-view camera to a low-level car to give maximum flexibility during post-production, enabling reframing to match green screenshots as needed.

“One of the added benefits was that, because of the 360-degree view, we immediately had reference material for reflections,” continued Alexander. “It made the integration of green screen action and real-world backgrounds much more believable, helping to really anchor everything in place. We then built a template inside Nuke to iterate across multiple sequences.”

All eight episodes of Paris Has Fallen are now available on Prime Video.