Vine FX wins Royal Television Society award for The Lazarus Project VFX

Cambridge-based video production studio Vine FX received a Royal Television Society (RTS) Craft & Design award this month for its visual effects (VFX) work on The Lazarus Project, a Sky TV science fiction drama series.

The studio, which relocated to the Station Road area from central London in 2016, delivered 890 VFX shots for the eight-part series – and there’s more to come with series two in production for the first half of 2023, says Michael Illingworth, Vine FX’s founder and VFX supervisor.

“It’s a huge achievement for us to win an RTS award, particularly for a VFX studio outside of London,” Michael said of the occasion. “We were up against major players. We’d been nominated three years running: the first was for War of the Worlds, last year it was The Serpent, so it was nice to win for The Lazarus Project – so third time lucky!

“It was a great evening, and for a very small company from Cambridge to be nominated alongside some huge TV shows was great, and to come away and win it was, for us, absolutely amazing.”

The Lazarus Project on Sky is an action-packed near-future thriller with prescient themes written by Giri/Haji creator Joe Barton.

“He’s a really good writer,” enthuses Michael. “He started writing it six years ago. It was originally called Extinction. It’s an interesting take on time travel which basically involves a mass extinction event, and there’s a group of people who can time travel and remake the clock of history.

“Only a handful of people are aware of these time loops which jump back to a July 1 checkpoint. The mass extinction events included an atomic bomb in episode one – we blow up Paris with a nuclear bomb for that – and Joe Barton foretold Covid when he wrote it because he references a global pandemic which appears in the show… it’s very cleverly done.”

For every apocalypse, the Lazarus team turns back time by making a phone call, taking everyone back to the checkpoint. There were stop-start elements in the VFX production cycle too, remarks Michael.

“They were going to do a chase sequence in Paris,” he says, “but there were various mostly pandemic-related problems and it was relocated to Prague, which meant we had to change some of the streets in the chase to resemble Parisian architecture.”

The relocation required more than 100 VFX shots including motorcycles, police cars, vans, driving shootouts and crashing cars. For the actual nuclear explosion on the capital of France the team created the cityscape in 3D and then introduced the mushroom clouds, blast waves and compression rings with heavy smoke and ground fires which lay waste to the city.

One of the original nuclear attacks apparently involved Russia as the aggressor on Ukraine, but that had to be reworked for another country following sensitivities raised by the invasion earlier this year. Other work involved creating settings in Eastern Europe, Shanghai and Beirut.

Vine FX worked with London-based production company Urban Myth on the project, continuing a collaboration which has included Merlin, Atlantis and War of the Worlds.

Laura Usaite, Vine FX’s head of production for the past three years, says the secret of Vine FX’s success is running a tight ship.

“For The Lazarus Project we had everything from a traditional green screen shot to a full CGI (computer-generated imagery) nuclear explosion, so we were delivering high-quality shots across the movie but staying low-budget throughout.”

Creating these effects requires a significant team, which features a Cambridge-based crew and freelancers across the world.

“Working at capacity we have a team of 45,” says Michael, “with a core team in Cambridge of 20. We moved into Bateman Street last year and we’re now hoping to bring more artists to come into Cambridge.

“We’ve always embraced new technology early on, and when pandemic happened we hadn’t realised people could remote into us from anywhere in the world. The systems we have in place are capable of delivering world-class visual effects, and as we take on work for bigger and bigger shows we’re able to entice people to join us. We’re not the same size as some of the larger studios but we have the same equipment. We’re investing in new tech too, £200k every year on equipment.

“Previously a company like ours would work in Soho but now we can work anywhere, we deliver to our client’s desks, so we’ve found a lot of freedom in the last two years, and Cambridge is an alternative to the lifestyles of a big city – Cambridge is a beautiful city and we’re really keen to promote it.”

“We’re also keen to use our knowledge if anyone in the Cambridge community wants to work with us,” adds Laura, in what is perhaps a subtle reference to potential crossover with video game producers. Michael notes that type of collaboration is already in place with Microsoft, with Vine FX creating CGI assets for the software giant.

In many ways Vine FX – navigated so shrewdly as it is – but it has also benefited from the huge recent expansion in streaming services, including Amazon Prime, Disney+, Netflix et al.

“Indeed,” Michael says. “Everyone sat at home and got a Netflix or Sky account, so we were able to expand quite quickly.”

Vine FX closes 2022 full of optimism for 2023, adds Michael.

“The bulk of the work on season 2 of The Lazarus Project will be done in January, for delivery in June. We’re currently working on five different shows – six actually, which includes The Witcher season 3. The budget for that is huge.

“The six we’re working on are with different companies all over the world, so it’s great that we’re being invited to those sorts of shows.”