UK in Focus - page 22

Spotlight
Special effectS
the clock, and support the work of the parent
companies in the UK.
And UK effects are not just being showcased
in big-screen productions — recent demand for
TV visual effects has risen with the renaissance
in episodic drama.“Drama producers value VFX
because it suggests production values of ambi-
tion and scale,” says Cohen, who led the team at
The Mill and then Milk to deliver movie-style
VFX for the BBC’s
Doctor Who
. “Where TV VFX
were once considered cheap or shoddy, the
dividing line between feature film and TV is
now very fine and
Doctor Who
can claim to have
embedded that in UK TV production culture.”
While facilities such as Milk started out spe-
cialising in TV before branching into features,
giants such as Dneg have set up dedicated TV
divisions. It is working with Andy Serkis’s west
London-based performance-capture studio
Imaginarium to bring high-production-value
photoreal animated characters — such as
Star
Wars
’ Supreme Leader Snoke, on which Imagi-
narium worked— to the small screen.
“The aim is to fuse compelling performance
capture with post-production to create intrigu-
ing new stories and formats on a TV budget,”
says Imaginarium CEO Tony Orsten. “This is a
set of skills that the UK as a country will be
able to offer this year.”
A vibrant clutch of mid-size outfits are also
picking up big business while the largest shops
scoop their share of summer blockbusters
(Dneg worked on
Captain America: Civil War
,
Star
Trek Beyond
and
Jason Bourne
; Cinesite has
Independence Day: Resurgence
; MPC has
X-Men:
Apocalypse
; Framestore has
Jungle Book: Ori-
gins
,
Geostorm
and
Doctor Strange
and all are
creating
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find
Them
).
“The larger facilities were only doing the big,
punchy blockbusters but the smaller films
deserved as much care, and we felt we could do
that without the big overheads,” says BlueBolt
founder LucyAinsworth-Taylor,who spied a gap
in the market for indie films and high-end TV.
Landing VFX for the first season of
Game of
Thrones
instantly put BlueBolt on the map, and
it has since completed BBC flagship drama
War
& Peace
and has also booked in Brad Pitt-pro-
duced Netflix satire
War Machine
, Fox sci-fi
Mor-
gan
and Scott Free’s eight-part drama
Taboo
.
Similarly, Adam Gascoyne and Tim Caplan
have enjoyed a steady stream of work since
launching Union VFX in 2008. “Most of the big
houses concentrate on their relationships with
THE AIM IS TO
FUSE COMPELLING
PERFORMANCE
CAPTURE WITH
POST-PRODUCTION
TO CREATE INTRIGUING NEW
STORIES AND FORMATS ON
A TV BUDGET
Tony Orsten, Imaginarium
The Imaginarium at work
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