Union Delivers Over 900 VFX Shots for ‘28 Years Later’

London and Montréal-based VFX studio Union crafted over 900 shots as the sole VFX vendor on the recently released feature, 28 Years Later.

Union co-founder and VFX Supervisor Adam Gascoyne previously worked with director Danny Boyle on the original 28 Days Later. Dillan Nicholls served as DFX Supervisor alongside Noel O’Malley as CG Supervisor and Paul O’Hara as VFX Producer for Union.

The horror story set in the world created by 28 Days Later takes place three decades after a rage virus escapes a biological weapons laboratory. One group of survivors lives on a small island connected to the mainland by a single, heavily defended causeway. When one of the islanders leaves on a mission, he discovers secrets, wonders, and horrors that have mutated not only the infected but other survivors as well.

Check out Union’s breakdown reel now:

“Danny and I have worked together for a long time, and I know it’s important for him to feel the rawness of the film,” said Gascoyne. “We use VFX as a tool to help tell the story creatively, to support character arcs and development so everything we do has to be very much background and found within the photography. There is an enormous amount of planning that goes into achieving that to give Danny the freedom to shoot and get the performances they need without interference.”

“In the film, the country has been without technology for nearly three decades, so we had to seamlessly sell that narrative to the viewer,” Gascoyne continued. “We had to make the unreal world real and totally believable. There was a huge amount of VFX work involved, but much of it is invisible. However, two sequences that were pivotal to the plot are the Causeway chase and the Happy Eater. Both look pretty epic in the final film, and I’m incredibly proud of the team’s work.”

One key environment was the Causeway that connects the ‘safe’ island to the mainland, which is overrun by the Infected. Spike (portrayed by Alfie Williams) and his dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) traverse the area during a rite of passage. The sequence contains 130 shots, most of which were fully CG. The causeway itself had to look like it was 1.5 miles long and included a fully CG aurora nebula sky housing a murmuration of over 10,000 CG birds.

“There’s quite a significant amount of work in that particular sequence,” Gascoyne explained. “We had to create an environment for that to happen in, and then extend all that water out and put it in the sky. We had some amazing photographic references from photographer Dan Monk at the Kielder Forest Observatory. There are certain times of the year when the Milky Way is perfectly clear because there’s no light pollution around. That inspired us to put this amazing sky above the causeway, because we felt that, after 28 years of no light pollution, you would see these amazing, beautiful vistas at night.”

Later in the film, Spike sneaks off the island for medical assistance and is forced to seek safety in an abandoned Happy Eater, only to find a toxic miasma of gas looming overhead which explodes when ignited by gunfire.

“A great deal of look development work was required to create the miasma gas as reference was minimal,” said O’Malley. “The gas had to be quite thin with little density, so it was complex to create [...]. This was a very FX heavy setup with the layering of the miasma and ignition towards the end of the sequence. Particular attention was paid to the cut so any movement we added to the miasma worked well with the next shot.”

“The lighting was a challenge as we needed to give the impression of an oily top layer on the gas as it hadn’t been disturbed in years,” concluded O’Malley. “The shot also required extensive rotoanimation to drive the collisions of the choking characters with the miasma gas.”

Union’s work also covered multiple CG firing arrows, blood splats, a herd of galloping deer, and a pack of rats scurrying away from a CG train.

Source: Union

Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.