The Lazarus Project: Season 2

From Tunnels to Time Travel: Vine FX Delivers Again For The Lazarus Project

As shows grow and develop they naturally become more ambitious, adding richer visuals and higher quality effects to thrill and delight their audience. The Lazarus Project hit that bar pretty early on by setting off a nuclear explosion in Paris, and yet the effects work in season two was much more detailed.

“Season two is a lot bigger than the first,” comments Pedrom Dadgostar, Vine FX’s Head of 3D. “There aren’t any huge explosions or what you might think of as ‘landmark’ set pieces, but the amount of CG and compositing required was huge. A lot of action takes place in an underground base, and most of that is entirely CG.”

Producers, Urban Myth, don’t shy away from using computer generated imagery. It’s about two things: building locations that just don’t exist in the real world, and creating a safe working environment for actors and stunt performers. All that while maintaining precision control over the final look.

The production’s commitment both to actors and the audience is impressive. The Lazarus Project has created a fantastic world, leaning into the unreal and often confusing realm of time travel to tell stories of real human heart, with a Saturday evening sense of entertainment value.

“We had an enormous amount of creative control,” says Kaitlyn Beattie. “What’s great about working with repeat clients is that we’ve already built up a sense of trust – they know what we can do. We’ve got a well-established technical pipeline and creative workflow to tackle these kinds of projects, and it’s great to see what the team comes up with that maintains the world set up in season one, but also expands on it.”

Going Underground

Scouting niche locations takes time and budget, and it’s something that, in the past, just couldn’t be avoided. But with the tools and techniques available to today’s productions, small screen shows can build large, sprawling worlds.

The Lazarus Project’s underground bunker was part practical set – something the actors could walk around and interact with, but most of its nearly 120 sq km area, for obvious reasons, was built in CG.

“We had to match what had been shot on the stage,” continues Dadgostar. “There were a lot of lines that needed to be replicated perfectly in CG – railings, walls, and so on – otherwise the blend wouldn’t have worked.”

Vine FX ended up constructing the entire base, including kilometres of underground tunnels. And the team built it comprehensively, enabling them to move a digital camera around the location and match shots filmed from any angle.

“This kind of approach gives us unlimited ability to replicate the orientation of the raw plates,” adds Dadgostar. “We’re able to move around the scene and place our CG background to match perspectives.”

But the level of detail and sheer number of assets involved required Vine FX to adopt a proxy workflow, framing with low poly versions of the full assets and replacing them with their high fidelity counterparts during rendering. It meant that the team could move quickly, spending their time where it was needed most.

Crafting The Details

Season two shows us, for the first time, what time travel looks like in the world of The Lazarus Project. Deep tunnels, pods, and complex particle effects lend themselves to the exciting moment where we see the process for the first time.

“Time travel has been done a lot on screen,” comments Dadgostar. “It was important for us to find a way to keep the look of it interesting, but still immediately identifiable as what it is. There’s a lot of simulation and lighting that goes into creating a CG shot like this – CG sets have to react to lighting and vice versa. And we had to carefully construct kilometres of tunnels to achieve the speed seen in the completed sequence.”

Finer details are quite often the visual effects components that make or break a shot. Getting the compositing correct goes a long way to ensuring that what an audience sees on screen is believable and doesn’t break them out of the story. One area this really shines is the planes we see flying through clouds and storms.

“It’s a fairly simple matter to create a CG plane and make it fly,” says Dadgostar. “What really sells the looks is the detail you put into the model – particularly where you’re doing close up shots – and how it’s blended into its environment. Reflections and lighting are vitally important here.”

“We crewed up a lot for this production,” Beattie says. “Our core team is about 20 people, but we needed to bring on more compositors, modellers, and generalists – we ended up with a team of 50 for The Lazarus Project. It’s always exciting when you see people coming on board, collaborating with other artists, and delivering something so compelling.”

The Key to a Good Shot

Green screen keying has been part of VFX for decades, giving production teams the ability to shoot first and add locations or details later. But not all green screen shots are created equal.

“There were a few tricky ones on this project,” comments Maxwell Alexander, Compositing Supervisor at Vine FX. “We had a tunnel location and the green screens were lit quite darkly on set, so keying them out was a bit of a challenge. There were also a lot of lens flares from things like torches crossing the camera. On a detail-heavy production like The Lazarus Project you end up with an enormous number of assets and plates to combine into a believable scene. The team has done a really fantastic job.”

The team ended up recreating many of those flares in post-production, building on what remained from the keying process and matching to the original plates. “It’s always interesting blending live action, CG, and other synthetic assets into a final sequence,” adds Alexander. “The Lazarus Project gave us a lot of opportunities to stretch ourselves and still deliver a really high quality, believable result.”

With 529 shots across the season, Vine FX has helped to tell the story of The Lazarus Project’s time travelling, mind-bending heroes and villains. All through a combination of full CGI and invisible VFX.

The Lazarus Project Season 2 is available to watch on Now TV.