Abstract: London-based boutique VFX studio completes more than 350 shots employing a range of ‘invisible effects’ for StudioCanal’s new action thriller directed by James Watkins.
LONDON -- Union VFX has announced details of its work as sole VFX vendor on StudioCanal’s new action thriller Bastille Day, which stars Idris Elba (The Wire) as a CIA agent on the hunt for terrorists in Paris. The film, which is due for release this spring, is directed by James Watkins (The Woman in Black), and produced by Philippe Rousselet’s Vendome Pictures and Steve Golin’s Anonymous Content. In addition to Elba, its cast includes Richard Madden (Game of Thrones), Charlotte Le Bon (The Walk) and Kelly Reilly (Sherlock Holmes).
Union was involved in Bastille Day throughout the entire production process, completing more than 350 shots. The work covered a broad spectrum of “invisible effects”, such as architectural extensions, crowd multiplication, and the addition of vehicles, props and gore. Union’s input also included stunt-augmentation effects on driving sequences, explosions and shootouts.
Simon Hughes, lead VFX supervisor on the film, remarked, “Bastille Day is a great example of how the Union team plays to its strengths in collaboration with directors and producers. But we also had a huge amount of fun with this film. It’s packed with adrenalin and big action moments, which are challenging to do well from a VFX perspective but amazing when you pull them off.”
The fast-moving thriller features several high-octane scenes, including a vertiginous chase sequence in which stunt doubles are seen running across a partially built rooftop in Paris. In addition to adding the peripheral architecture, vehicles, props and people, Union also helped infuse the sequence with a greater sense of danger by scaling out the original plates to make them appear wider, and adding hand-held camera movements to exaggerate the feeling of vertigo.
One of the pivotal moments of the movie is a massive bomb explosion at a Paris Metro station. Union turned a practical detonation into a major explosion using a series of CG generated elements. It also intensified the drama of the moment by bringing the explosion much closer to the actors and camera, and adding lethal debris, such as flying postcard racks, a smashed park bench and extensive rubble.
During the closing moments of Bastille Day, a mass riot starts outside a bank. London’s National Maritime Museum in Greenwich stood in for the bank, and 200 extras were drafted in to provide the rioting crowd. The extras were filmed in a tiling formation so that they could be composited together as one group. The museum’s architecture, meanwhile, needed to be extended and remodelled to make it appear more like a bank within a central city location. To create a “bigger” cinematic moment and to make sense geographically of the police’s arrival at the scene by helicopter, Union created a full CG aerial view of the huge crowds surrounding the bank.
Here is the official synopsis of the film:
On the eve of France’s most important national holiday, Bastille Day, a young French woman, Zoe Naville (Le Bon), slips into Paris with the intent of planting a bomb to make a radical political statement. At the last moment, however, she decides that she cannot commit such a potentially viole.nt act. Michael Mason (Madden), an American pickpocket, steals Zoe’s bag, keeps what he can use and throws the rest into a garbage bin next to a busy Metro station. Meanwhile, inside the ultra-secure CIA headquarters in Paris, troubled Syria and Iraq veteran Sean Briar (Elba) is struggling to adjust to his new role as a desk-bound data-analyst — a misfit real warrior in the world of cyber counter-terrorism. When the bomb explodes, Mason is the obvious suspect and Briar is determined to find him and bring him into custody before the French authorities do.
Source: Union VFX
