VFX Test – Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire!

Our aim with this project was to create a completely surreal yet realistic looking scene.  We filmed footage from our balcony of the buildings across the road from the Lucid office in such a way that the footage felt as though our cameraman was running outside to see what was happening only to be confronted by a meteor shower hitting Cape Town.

We tracked the footage and cleaned up the shots a little to remove unwanted visual distractions like traffic on the  road. All of the meteors were CG, utilising Max and fumeFX to generate the smoke trails and flames.  We combined stock footage of fires, explosions and sparks with the effects created in fumeFX.

We modeled a half decimated version of the existing building and animated it crumbling as it is destroyed upon impact.  We textured the building using a mixture of Photoshop and projection mapping from the live action footage.  Finally we did some colour correction and sky replacement in order to match up the various elements and sell our intended apocalypse look.

We were more than happy with the end result, good job team!