ILP

Syfy – Childhood's End

We had the fortune to work on this epic 3 episode miniseries for Syfy Channel last year. The show, Childhood's end is an adaptation of a Sci-fi Novel from the 1950’s written by Arthur C Clarke. We were given the exciting opportunity to be included all the way from concept, design, previs and layout of the shots to the execution of close to 100 complex visual effects shots.

Our first sequence was in the opening episode when the alien Overlords approached Earth for the first time. We made a dozen shots where the Overlord mothership emerges from the clouds where we needed to render big-scale fluid simulations with the embedded ship. We used both houdini and maya for the simulation work and it was all rendered together with Arnold.

The third and final episode where we visit the Overlords’ home planet, came with an even greater challenge. It features a large scale full CG environment with plenty of atmospheric effects like smoke, fog and lava rivers as well as crowds of flying spaceships and Overlords that make the world feel inhabited and populated.

We went for a full CG approach on these environments rather than a 2.5D or matte painting solution. We had quite a long pre-production period, but a very short production schedule. Final shot count, and layout was not locked and assigned until late in the process, so we spent a decent amount of time during pre-production to build a good set of assets in order to swiftly set up, and construct scenes once shots were awarded.

The work for the final episode was recognised with a nomination for "Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Episode" at the prestigious 2016 VES awards! This is something that we are very proud of and our gratitude goes to our fantastic crew at ILP for their hard work, passion and commitment as well as to the overall VFX Supervisor; Kevin Blank and his dedicated team!