Financial incentives, diverse culture, deep experience and a ready-made infrastructure make the London vfx community appealing to foreign production companies.

If you’ve been reading the credits on movies at your local cineplex, you may have discovered an interesting fact: a huge number of them have the post- production and vfx done in the U.K., mostly in London. You probably also read lately that Kodak closed the vfx division of Cinesite Los Angeles — while Cinesite London is recruiting more staff to work on current production that includes Alien vs. Predator, Alfie, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, King Arthur, Sahara and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! What is going on over there, you ask — is warm beer good for you, after all?

The answer comes in several parts. The first is that London turns out to be a terrific place to get media work done. It has a thoroughly developed infrastructure — you can get almost any film-related work done within a few blocks in Central London, whether it’s vfx, set design, catering, transport, filming, PR, or pyrotechnics. The U.K. is the leading European location for film production investment, and London has the U.K.’s largest media-related skill base, with more than 200,000 people working the field. There are more than 220 stages in more than 60 studios in London, including Pinewood (14 stages, five tanks), Shepperton (14 stages, four tanks), and Leavesden, which boasts the largest back lot complex outside of the U.S.

The government and labor laws are relatively friendly, and there is good connectivity — a new fiber optic network called SohoNet links 12 London-based production houses together and connects London to Los Angeles as if they were neighbors. There appears to be great creativity in adapting London and its environs for a remarkable range of live shots — how else to explain Stanley Kubrick using London’s Docklands for scenes supposedly shot in Saigon for his Full Metal Jacket? The number of films shot and/or post produced in London is remarkable. Some of them seem obvious candidates for work in the U.K., because they relate to stories that take place in England, such as About a Boy, 101 Dalmations, Harry Potter (all three), Robin Rood and Bridget Jones’ Diary. But what about The Fifth Element, Evita, True Lies, Event Horizon, Batman Forever, Saving Private Ryan, Mission: Impossible 2, Gladiator and Cold Mountain? Clearly, there is something about shooting and vfx production in London that directors and American studios like.

Double Negative has perfected underwater work in many films, including Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. Courtesy of Double Negative.

Which brings us to the second reason: there is a terrific creative pool in the city. The epicenter for star-studded vfx houses is Soho, an edgy area full of creatives, pubs and post-production facilities. Unlike its New York counterpart, which gets its name from being “SOuth of HOuston street,” this artists colony got its moniker from one of its 18th Century residents, the Duke of Monmouth, son of King Charles I, who used to bellow “So-Ho” when galloping off on a hunt or into battle. Apparently he did a lot of bellowing and galloping, because the name has stuck ever since.

One of the star studios in Soho is MPC, originally The Moving Picture Co., on Wardour Street. The facility is not what you would imagine a traditional British building to look like — it is open, bright, airy and modern, with a blue-colored pool table and industrial-sized espresso coffee machine on one of its six floors to entertain and energize the working troops; other floors contain major office space and humming air-conditioned pods of ultramodern server and render farms. MPC has an impressive list of titles it is working on, including Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; it just finished work on the recently released Troy. Surprisingly, although MPC makes expert use of normal toolsets such as Maya, Red Hat Linux, RenderMan and Shake, it also has a major force of programmers to generate custom-built tools. “We decided not to use the Massive toolset for crowd management,” says MPC’s Michael Elson. “It did not have the fine levels of control we were after for Troy and Harry Potter. We’ve had up to 25 programmers working on a proprietary toolset that we feel is world class — which is what we needed for the highly realistic men and horses in Troy.”