Visual effects company BlueBlot delivered 138 VFX shots to help recreate the 1930s pre-war era of Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale.
The company worked on sequences including a trip through London’s Piccadilly Circus and the family’s day at the races.
BlueBolt’s VFX supervisor Henry Badgett, CG supervisor Dave Cook and 2d supervisor Graham Day worked with the film’s DoP Ben Smithard and director Simon Curtis to create a full CG environment for the Piccadilly Circus sequence, incorporating CG vehicles and crowd with the live action elements. Their work combined the two filming locations of Mortlake Studios car park and Richmond Theatre for a transition as the camera moves into the theatre and right through to the stage.
“There were all sorts of challenges involved with this sequence,” said Badgett. “Chiefly combining the two filming locations. Before shooting we had to tech-viz the camera positions to ensure a smooth transition from the blue screen set to the Richmond theatre location. The shot has a wipe designed into it when a man runs for the bus in front of the camera, but it doesn’t cover the whole frame, so the remaining street was momentarily fully CG with the foreground crowd elements tracked in.
On the day of filming on the bluescreen set the BlueBolt team only had a four hour window between sunset and wrap to complete their work. Dealing with pouring rain, they had to go ahead as planned. “We thought of it as a free wet-down, which we would have done anyway for the reflections of the Piccadilly lights stand-ins,” said Badgett.
“It then turned out in the edit that the amount of live action vehicles we had still looked relatively quiet for Piccadilly Circus, so adding more CG vehicles in between existing ones was a major unanticipated challenge.
“The lighting of the blue screen set was probably the single thing that did the most heavy lifting creatively,” he added. “It gave us really solid reflections on the wet ground for us to match with Piccadilly adverts, but in a very forgiving way that we could add to as well.”
