Intergalactic prison break
Trevor Hogg learns how Milk VFX assisted a group of escaped convicts in the Sky series Intergalactic…
Milk VFX takes us behind the scenes of sci-fi drama Intergalactic and its outerspace worlds
Ajailbreak takes place onboard a prisoner transport ship known as the Hemlock, which leads to a series of adventures ranging from a crash landing on a planet that gets ravaged by a massive dust storm, to visiting a submerged world populated with destroyed rollercoasters.
Intergalactic consists of eight episodes overseen by showrunner Julie Gearey (Cuffs) that required 850 visual effects shots provided by Milk VFX, which in turn received additional support from Egg VFX. There was not much of an opportunity for production VFX supervisor Jean-claude Deguara (Good Omens) to reuse assets as environments were not revisited, except for scenes involving futuristic London. “This happens a 100 years into the future,” explains Deguara. “We have done a few projects in the past where we needed London so we managed to get a full
layout of the city. Afterwards we spoke with director Kieron Hawkes [Fortitude] and discussed how many shots and how much we should do to make this an epic sequence; he went off with a storyboard artist, planned a whole sequence of shots and came back to us. We could constantly keep adding and building up the areas that needed it the most within the real-world space.”
New London has been built on top of Old London, which has been decimated by a flood. “We looked at massive caves to give us an idea of how light would behave on such a massive scale,” notes Matias Derkacz, head of 2D and onset VFX supervisor. “There is no actual reference of a covered city that we could say, ‘We need to match to this.’”
A nine-mile radius was built around major landmarks. “A layout tool was built that we layered on a TBU [To Be Updated] cache basis,” explains Dimitris Lekanis,
FX lead at Milk VFX. “We didn’t have to worry about the instancing because it was coming from the layout tool.” Buildings were constructed and then destroyed.
“We used Arnold operators on this job,” explains Sam Lucas, head of modelling at Milk VFX. “Previously, we had our own bespoke holder for look development, but the person who supported that had left the company. We therefore used a mix of alembic holders, GPU caches and
stand-ins that made the scenes nice and light.”
Another major environment build was the planet of Pau Rosa, where the Hemlock crash lands in the middle of a dense forest. “It was helpful having the partial set build of the Hemlock specifically when it comes to a stop,” remarks Derkacz. “It not only helped us to know where the Hemlock was stopping but how it was going to look when it stops. The set gave us a good reference of textures and was helpful in getting the Hemlock to work in the environment.”
Hundreds of thousands of trees had to be produced, with those along the path of the Hemlock getting destroyed. “For the trees, we had some nice ones that were onset and created alien ones that were all concepted,” states Lucas. “We had a few different varieties of alien trees.”
A layout was devised for the forest that consisted of static trees. “Animation took the layout because we wanted the Hemlock to interact in a nice way with the trees on how it was crushing them,” explains Lekanis. “Then we took these big trees and broke them up. Effects had a lot of upwards dependencies; that’s why it was a big task.”
Despite the prevailing orange colour grade on Pau Rosa, the original concept of the trees had quite vivid colours. “There were lots of pinks and blues,” states Deguara. Kieron wanted to push through lots of different colours
Above: It was important to make sure that the bubbles did not obscure the eyes so as to retain the original performance “THERE IS NO ACTUAL COVERED CITY THAT WE COULD SAY, ‘WE NEED TO MATCH TO THIS’” Matias Derkacz, head of 2D & VFX supervisor, Milk VFX
in the smoky dust elements.” Special effects were utilised to get interaction with the actors for the close-up shots of the massive sandstorm. “The sandstorm was definitely something,” reveals Lekanis. “The main thing was to have control between what we see and what we don’t see, and how we hide or include the spaceship. Specifically for effects, how are we able to make something so it can be rendered and simulated? Do we simulate the whole world or are we able to make it in a more clever way? We had deep techniques and quite a lengthy R&D stage here so instead of simulating everything we instanced the volumetric simulation to create the build-up needed to show this land being destroyed. It was entirely CG.”
One of the wonders of the universe is an asteroid field known as the Hestia Wreath, which was inspired by geysers freezing in mid-air. “Each asteroid is made of the main rock clump,” remarks Lucas. “You have these big obsidian type of crystals that reflect loads of light and have big flat surfaces on them. Then we had these quartz little spiky crystals. We made quite a few variations of the bits that we had. We had hero assets, but the asteroid that the Hemlock was on is close to camera, so it served as our test bed
to get that all sorted. After that we could make loads of different variations with all of the elements that we had. For texturing, we went through a few iterations. We looked at images of striped rocks and bright colours; that was toned down. We had to be careful with the crystals because they couldn’t look too aggressive. The spiky ones started to look a little like teeth.”
“Kieron kept the shots big and wide for the moments when the pod is travelling to and from the Hemlock and the Phoenix,” says Deguara. “The more intimate moments in the dialogue were all done from looking outside the observation deck.”
A layout was done for the master shot. “Once we had laid out that shot, we put that layout into other shots,” explains Neil Roche, head of 3D at Milk VFX. “The layout of each asteroid and asset was tweaked to make each shot as visually interesting as possible.”
The lighting was cheated to create sundog lens flares. “At the end of the day, besides the layout, it was important to keep a balance to the composition and not have all of the rocks exactly the same size,” notes Derkacz. “It’s about trying
“EACH ASTEROID AND ASSET WAS TWEAKED TO MAKE EACH SHOT VISUALLY INTERESTING” Neil Roche, head of 3D, Milk VFX
to keep depth and we achieved that by having a sun on camera.”
Next to the sunlight was a massive moon. “We used that to light it the way you would do on a film set,” explains Deguara. “It gave us a bit of side lighting and an extra bounce light.”
Submerged under ten feet of water is the planet of Kelp. “We used a lot of the same techniques that were developed for London,” notes Roche. “They didn’t want a huge submersion.”
The effects process was streamlined. “In general, we like to experiment technically as much as we can in order to save more time somewhere else. In this case we decided to try to export from Houdini,” says Lekanis. “We decided to bake the ocean into a multitude of textures because most of our planet was already developed and laid out with Arnold in mind. We had to create a configured system based on what the camera is actually seeing and how far it is from the camera; based on that we had to figure out how much detail to bake in.”
Along with the Hotel Kelp there are various rollercoasters. “We made a big kit of parts for all of the rollercoasters,” states Lucas. “Some were complete while other ones were broken down. We had loads of jetties in different states of decay that enabled the layout to be rearranged on a per-shot basis.”