Behind the scenes with One of Us.
The setting for Tom Harper’s Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man film—a continuation of the Peaky Blinders episodic series—is during World War II. This means we now venture into war time, and the result is a lot more explosive.
Engaged to deliver war-related aerial scenes and bombings, and a number of other explosive moments, was One of Us. Here, One of Us visual effects supervisor Guillaume Ménard, who worked with production visual effects supervisor Theo Demiris on the film, runs down the wartime work on Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.
Cockpit views for the bombing blitz scenes in the film began as bluescreen plates shot with interactive flashing lights to simulate the bomb’s lighting interaction with the cockpit glass and the interior. “Using the flashes as a guide,” recounts Ménard, “we created a library of CG flak explosions that we placed in the shots, matching the timings from the plate.”
“A lot of time went into establishing the right mood of the shot,” adds Ménard. “We wanted to strike the right balance between the ominous tone of a night time bombing whilst still allowing enough visibility for the audience. Between lighting and comp, we revealed just enough of the city environment and CG planes to build tension. We carefully controlled cloud density and timing, using subtle moonlight and explosion flashes to intermittently reveal surrounding planes, falling bombs and glimpses of the city below.”
For shots of the bombs hitting structures, production filmed practical explosions at the old BSA factory in Birmingham. This gave One of Us a base for the shots. The studio then extended scenes by building out a wider CG environment filled with 30 buildings. Says Ménard: “We started off by extending the real factory buildings upwards and then built out the wider city environment in CG including workers houses, viaduct, gas holder and other various buildings to sell the industrial part of town the action was taking place in.”
“We retained as much of the practical explosions as possible, enhancing them with CG to increase scale, particularly in wider shots,” continues Ménard. “Additional destruction, dust and debris helped bridge between the real plates and CG environments, including details like flying bricks and vehicles.”
The aftermath of the bombing, especially around the factory building, is told with the aid of several wide views of the area. One of Us worked with Demiris to “block out how much of the factory building and surrounding buildings we wanted to destroy,” says Ménard. “It had to be enough to sell the deaths that occurred, but not enough for everything to be completely obliterated as certain areas needed to come up again later in the film. We also needed to strike a balance between selling the force of the bombing, while still keeping the realism of the plates. As this sequence is quite long, we also had to take into consideration the amount of shots that might need building replacements so careful consideration was put into what got destroyed!”
“We start the sequence with a couple wide shots which show the overall destruction of the city,” remarks Ménard. “This helped sell the destruction we see when cutting to the bomb factory shots. For the wides, a more procedural approach was used for the city’s destruction. We compositionally picked certain bomb impact points and then did radial dial outs of destruction based on how ‘strongly’’ a bomb hit that area. Conversely, for the main factory building, it was a lot more manual work in order to achieve the level of control as we needed for this hero building. Based on concepts and references we built our destroyed version to really sell the size of the bombing in the different camera angles we had.”
More explosions permeate the rest of the film. This includes a barge explosion at the docks. For this scene, multiple plates were shot including a real explosion on a canal barge at night, some plates of a stunt man getting projected by the explosion with some interactive practical light, and a variety of explosion elements at different scales. “Based on this,” shares Ménard, “we created an FX explosion that allowed us to create a much bigger explosion, as well as helped us blend all the different shot elements. Most of the environment in these shots was replaced with our CG environment which allowed us accurate light interaction with the explosion and adding all the secondary interactions from the explosion such as dust shockwave, breaking glass, debris and so on.”
Then there’s the counterfeit cash explosion. Ménard breaks down the approach: “Similarly to some of the other explosions in the film, the production team shot a great practical explosion of the money crates. Initially we were only asked to combine a plate of Tommy (Cillian Murphy) getting blown away by the explosion to the main explosion plate but towards the end, we were asked to give the destruction on that shot more scale to add more drama to the final scene.”
Here, One of Us created CG versions of the wooden crates and banknotes and used these to extend the debris field and enhance the spread of the explosion. “Careful compositing ensured these additions blended with the practical elements,” details Ménard. “Secondary effects such as falling dust, breaking glass, and reacting ceiling lights really helped sell the force and scale of the blast.”
