Studio Blackbird has shared with AWN and VFXWorld their work on Peacock’s Critics Choice Award-winning and Golden Globes nominated limited-miniseries thriller, All Her Fault.

Starring Sarah Snook as Marissa Irvine, the miniseries follows a mother who goes to pick up her son Milo from a playdate, only to discover the woman at the door has never heard of him. The series relies heavily on invisible VFX to sustain its grounded realism and escalating tension.

Led by VFX supervisor Nick Ponzoni and VFX executive producer Nerissa Kavanagh, Studio Blackbird embedded the VFX process directly into the cinematography and storytelling from the earliest stages of pre-production. Coming from a compositing background, Ponzoni believes the best visual effects go unnoticed to support tone, performance, and narrative.

Although filmed entirely in Melbourne, the series had to double for suburban Chicago, which required attention to environmental detail. Tree species, road surfaces, traffic flow, rooftops, seasonal light, and more were carefully adjusted to evoke the American Midwest. As the creative scope expanded, the VFX workload grew from an initial 200 shots to nearly 500 final shots.

A key location, the “Irvine house,” was shot in a rural area but needed to appear as though it were in an affluent Chicago neighborhood. This transformation involved extensive CG work, from replacing dirt roads with rich black asphalt to recreating entire 3D environments. Several key sequences, including drone shots over the lake and the house, were almost entirely CG builds.

Arguably the most pivotal point in the show involves a major car-crash sequence that the VFX studio executed fully in CG, designed to feel visceral and realistic rather than overtly stylized. While the total screen time is actually quite short, it carries huge narrative weight. “This is the moment where the mystery finally unravels for the viewer,” Ponzoni explains. “Motives seeded across earlier episodes rise to the surface, and questions or suspicions are finally answered. As with a lot of the work we do at Blackbird, the purpose was to support the narrative without the viewer questioning the reality of the moment on screen.”

He continues, “From a technical standpoint, working backwards was key. We began with the vehicles’ final resting positions - where they end up needed to serve the framing and the story beats of this key reveal. From there, we reverse-engineered the crash itself, ensuring the physics, trajectories, and energy of the impact plausibly delivered the cars to those positions. Balancing real-world physics with narrative intent was one of the biggest challenges of the sequence, but it was critical to getting the moment to feel authentic rather than engineered.”

Sound also plays a crucial role in the sequence, particularly in how it’s tied to the character Carrie’s [Sofia Lillis] psychological state. “In earlier episodes, fragments of non-diegetic crash audio are threaded through moments of heightened tension, at first reading almost as manifestations of her internal turmoil,” Ponzoni notes. “When the crash finally unfolds on screen, those auditory cues snap into focus. What once felt abstract becomes literal, and everything clicks into place. We considered the connection between character and event seriously when animating the sequence, particularly with Carrie’s car. This wasn’t just about simulating an accident; it was about making sure the mechanics of the crash reinforced the emotional and narrative logic of the story. The staging, timing, and final composition all needed to communicate very specific story points.”

Early conversations with the creative team made it clear that this crash had to feel brutal. Because this was a moment of “tragedy and deception colliding,” the violence of the impact needed to carry that emotional weight. “To ground the sequence, we leaned heavily on real-world references,” says Ponzoni. “Our team built a substantial library of real accident footage, particularly focusing on road and intersection collisions similar to the scripted scene. These references informed everything from the broad motion of the vehicles to the finer details: the way debris scatters, how smoke and steam behave immediately after impact, and how cars settle in the aftermath. Crash test footage, in particular, became invaluable. Watching how SUVs behave when struck laterally, how they lift, twist, and tumble, reveals nuances you simply wouldn’t invent. Incorporating those unexpected behaviors into the animation is often what pushes a shot from ‘convincing’ to ‘believable.’”

Commenting that “A sequence like this lives or dies on preparation,” Ponzoni describes how the crash was initially blocked out by the episode director (Kate Dennis) and DP (Earle Dresner) in “wonderfully old-school fashion,” a printed map of the location and a handful of Matchbox cars. That tactile approach made it easy to discuss intent and staging before they ever touched CG.

“At the same time,” he shares, “NantStudios was building a full CG version of the location for use on the volume stage, which allowed us to begin testing how the crash might play out spatially. We took those early block-outs and layered in a combination of simulation and hand animation in our pre-vis to refine the physics and get closer to what we wanted on screen.”

Once the final trajectories and resting positions were approved, the Studio Blackbird team worked closely with the Production Designer (Rob Harris) and the on-set team to ensure the practical cars were damaged in exactly the right places and aligned perfectly with the planned animation. “This was especially important because several post-crash shots required actors inside the vehicles, including one (Peter) [Jake Lacy] moving through the environment,” Ponzoni says, “and those moments needed to be filmed in situ and connected seamlessly back to the animated crash.”

Asked his favorite part of the work, Ponzoni concludes, “It’s hard to pick just one as so much detail went into this from our incredible VFX team. I love the subtle asymmetry in the way Carrie’s car absorbs and releases energy during the impact. It’s not a single hero moment, but a collection of small, almost imperceptible behaviors, a hesitation in the roll, a slight twist in the chassis, the uneven collapse of panels, that collectively sell the weight and violence of the crash. Those are the kinds of details audiences don’t consciously notice, but they feel them, and the team worked hard to get these in there. When you’re dealing with a moment this important to the story, that emotional credibility is everything.”

Source: Studio Blackbird