Crazyhead is a brand new comedy horror series about love, friendship and facing your demons. Created and written by BAFTA-winning Misfit’s creator Howard Overman, the six-part series follows the angst and exorcisms of an unlikely duo of demon hunters, Amy (Cara Theobold) and Raquel (Susan Wokoma)

Vine FX were the sole VFX vendor on Crazyhead and our small but talented team delivered over 750 shots across 6 episodes.

The key creative tasks included creating ‘Demon’ like faces and several digital cityscapes. There were also a huge amount of composite shots including green screen car inserts, bulging neck veins, a CG train as well as the usual ‘tech’ fixes.

Vine FX created 14 individual CG demon faces, three of which feature in the first episode. The initial concepts were designed by Coulier Creatures FX who then sculpted prosthetic sections that were applied to plastercasts of the actors. The resulting models were then photo-scanned by Ten24.

This provided us with a dense mesh we could sculpt on top of in the computer to further enhance the demon like characteristics. This included removing the lips exposing the teeth and hollowing out sections of the cheek and neck to reveal a burning inner core.

We used the photo-scanned models to accurately track the actor’s heads which enabled us to achieve a perfect fit with the CG. This was further enhanced using sub-pixel tracking to capture the subtle muscle movement on their skin. Our animators used XBOX motion sensors to create the facial animation using the actor’s performance as reference.

The Cityscapes were built from a variety of references and were lit for both day and night in Arnold. These were carefully tracked into place using a dense mesh lidar scan of the set. This gave us accurate parallax and pixel perfect tracking.

With a high shot count and a tight budget, our small team of artists were able to achieve cinema quality visual effects. Our objective is always to tell stories and enhance the vision of the programme makers. It is essential that we formulate the best approach that will work effectively across every sequence production requires us to enhance. This is key to achieving quality results at a pace needed for Television.