Crowning glory
How One of Us made invisible VFX for Netflix series The Crown
Ben Turner, VFX supervisor, The Crown
Kulsoom Middleton discovers the invisible VFX provided by One of Us that made Netflix series The Crown all the more authentic O ne of Us, a boutique film production company based in Soho, was responsible for the visual effects work on Netflix’s historical ten-part series about Queen Elizabeth II’S reign, The Crown. The show tells the inside story of two of the most famous addresses in the world – Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street – and the intrigues, love lives and machinations behind the great events that shaped the second half of the 20th century. Given the nature of the show, the challenge for One of Us was to create invisible yet effective VFX.
Using life-size replicas of Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, The Crown is one of the most lavish TV dramas ever made. One of Us worked in 4K on all 428 visual effects shots for this project, with an experienced team including Ben Turner as VFX supervisor and VFX producers Standish Millennas and Kim Phelan.
The events in The Crown may have taken place 60 years ago, but because of the iconic locations and imagery involved, they still feel current, meaning that attention to detail was vital for the VFX team. “For me there wasn’t one big stand out challenge on The Crown, it was more about nailing the believability across the show as a whole,” says Ben. “We were dealing with subjects, locations and images that millions of people are already very familiar with. So making sure they didn’t question them was something that we really worked very hard at.”
One of Us enhanced the locations and sets on The Crown with scale and authenticity, ensuring the VFX sat comfortably on screen. The team produced a variety of work for a number of different scenes, but key sequences such as the royal Wedding, the funeral of King George VI and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, all demanded a new way of working. nuke pipeline One of Us developed a tool within Nuke to populate large areas with specificallyshot crowd elements, helping to fill out big expansive shots with people. The scale and grandeur of the subject was something the team was striving to achieve, and the crowd tool really helped to achieve this. “This involved shooting specific crowd elements
there wasn’t one big stand out challenge on the crown, it was more about nailing the believability across the show
on set against green screen and then feeding them into the Nuke tool,” explains Ben. “It gave artists the ability to create huge numbers of crowd for their shots just in comp, they could dial in the percentage of people who were cheering or clapping or waving and mix them all up. This meant we could work quite efficiently and create the scale each scene required without the need for big CG crowd renders. It also really helps to have real people in real costumes to help sell the period,” he continues.
The fact that many viewers wondered how One of Us got permission to film at Buckingham Palace is testament to the wonderful job the VFX company did. “When we were working up the first shots of cars arriving at Buckingham Palace, I did breathe a sigh of relief. you could tell that our approach was going to work and that the set and the extension fit together perfectly. I think the biggest compliments I’ve received have been people asking what we did on the show. Since the launch, the production company leftbank have been getting calls demanding to know how they got permission to film at Buckingham Palace, I’ll take that!” Find out more about One of Us’s work: www.bit.ly/220-thecrown