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Work
Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
Queen Charlotte is back in this Bridgerton prequel
Project Category
Episodic
Client
Netflix Shondaland
Director
Various
Outpost VFX Producer
Megan Smith
Outpost VFX Supervisor
Roni Rodrigues John Mclaren
Outpost VFX Crew
Aarti Mistry, Aakash Choudhari, Aarti Pala, Aarti Panda, Abhijith A, Abhinav Vishnoi, Abhishek Jain, Abhishek Kandari, Adamya Mehta, Aditya Bhondave, Aitor Arroyo, Ajeet Pratap Singh, Ajinkya Barad, Ajitesh Tiwari, Ajith Ashokan, Akash Kharat, Akash Mohite, Akash Phadke, Akshay C Bhosale, Akshay Patharkar, Akshay Shirke, Aleks Slavov, Alex Grau, Amit Mishra, Amit Sikarwar, Anand Mishra, Andrea Belfiore, Aniket Devkar, Aniket Gurav, Aniket Kesarkar, Anil Verma Kumar, Ankit Jain, Ankit Toppo, Anshu Kumar, Anup Jachak, Anup Sinha, Arghyadip Das, Arjit Parsai, Arpit Gangrade, Arunkumar Patturaj, Ashokkumar Mohanji, Avi Sapale, Avidatta Deshmukh, Ayush Goyal, B. Shankar, Bhupesh Ghagare, Bhushan Kamble, Bhushan Thakur, Biswajit Moni, Borja Gonzalez, C-Jay Adams, Cale Pugh, Chetan Kore, Chinu K, Chris Coupe, Chris Glew, Chris Hunt, Chris Tang, Christian Wells, Colin Mayne, D kay Bhardwaj, Damodar Modgil, Danny Phillips, Darren Fereday, Darshan Joshi, David Alvarez Moran, Dayanand Chavare, Debadarshi (Dev) Panda, Debolina Dutta, Deepak Kumar, Deepak Rai, Deepak Yadav, Devendra Jagtap, Devyan Chauhan, Dharmesh Rathod, Dhiren Chudji, Dhruv Das, Dimple Padam, Dipali Itewad, Dushant Joshi, Edwin Santiago, Eleanor Follows, Elena Estevez Santos, Emily Towler, Evgenios Kakolyris, Gabriel Schmitt, Gaurav Joshi, Gilles Collart, Giorgio Pitino, Girish Chapde, Gurkirat Jaswal, Hamish MacLeod, Harshal Garud, Harshit Bhargava, Hitesh Solanki, Holly Potter Senior, Hugo Melo, Indrajeet Kumar, Jadheer TP, Jagadeesh Sakthivel, Jeevan John, Joelle Sadok, Johan Gay, John Mclaren, Jorge Puerto Formigos, Joshua Nimgal, Kallol Chakraborti, Kamlesh Singal, Kannathasan Ganesan, Katarina Radić, Keagan Harris, Kenneth Hau, Kirankumar Natarajan, Kishor Phalke, Linda Kim, Lubos Surzin, Madhav Agnihotri, Maeve Eydmann, Mahesh Mahadik, Mandali Sai Naga Prasanna Kumar, Manish Kumar, Manivannan Sekar, Manmath Biradar, Manmohan Singh, Marco Maggioni, Marie Miya Špačková, Mark Woodcock, Megan Smith, Melania Fodritto, Michal Bończyk, Mick Reid, Mikael Pettersén, Molly Tidd, Muthukumar S, Nagendra Singh, Naveen Kumar, Naveen Pulipaty, Neelam Bhaidkar, Neeraj Kamble, Neha Sandam, Nick Varga, Nick White, Nikhil More, Nilesh Gawade, Nitesh Bhalerao, Nithin Premadas, Pietro Cavallo, Pintoo Swainy, Pooja Lanjekar, Prabakaran M, Prabhash Kumar, Pradeep Mahato, Pranit Gadankush, Prasad Shinde, Pratik Jore, Pravin Panghate, Prerna Raghav, Priyanka Surve, Priyanka Tripathi, Puneet Kotnala, Radek Makarov, Rajesh Maan, Rajkumar Sarjerao Gore Gore, Rajnish Sharma, Ramana Reddy, Ranjeeth Naik, Rashmi Bhave, Razvan Dit, Reywel Hyland, Ricardo Einloft, Rohit Khedekar, Rohit Kumar, Rohit Palankar, Rohitur Rahaman, Roni Rodrigues, Sachin Pawar, Sagar Sadhu, Sai Koushik Sivaramakrishnan, Sameer Rane, Sandeep Karande, Sandeep Kumar, Sandeep Kute, Sanghpriy Ghodke, Sanket Shinde, Santosh Pokar, Santosh Thorat, Sara Maccaferri, Satwik Deversetty, Saurabh Nandedkar, Sebastian Raffaele, Shailesh Latad, Shamshad Mohammad, Shashi Kant, Shihas N S, Shraddha Kate, Shravan Kumar, Shruti Chauhan, Shubham Karkud, Simon Maddocks, Sohel Mulla, Sourab Ali, Sowman Bera, Srikanth Shankar, Steve Molloy, Subhashish Kundu, Sujeet Patil, Suraj Shinde, Suresh Dravidas, Susobhan Mandal, Swapnil Darekar, Swapnil Kamble, Sweta Tiwari, Syed Anwar, Tania Das, Thomas Heddell, Tim Gregson, Vaibhav Mankame, Valeriya Nikuta Korchagina, Venkata Kiran Kumar, Vignesh Govindharaj, Vihaan Sharma, vijay Manickam, Vivek D, Vivek Ranga, Wasim Ansari, Yogesh Malkar, Yuva Kumar Jampani, Zoya Ziaullah
Project Overview
“The majority of our work on Shondaland’s Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story involved augmenting, extending and enhancing a lot of the fabulous locations used for filming around the UK,” says Outpost VFX Supervisor John McLaren who, along with VFX Supervisor Roni Rodrigues, delivered a sole vendor award for the latest series in the Bridgerton universe.
As a prequel to the Netflix phenomenon, Bridgerton, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story follows a young Queen Charlotte's marriage to King George III of England; a marriage that sparks an epic love story and transforms high society. Viewers are given the same attention to detail for costume and set design that they are accustomed to seeing in the Bridgerton series.
Time period accuracy was of huge importance to the showrunner. McLaren explains the creative challenges this represented:
“The time period holds a lot of importance in this series, so we knew we needed to be really accurate with our environments and assets.
“We needed to ensure what we were creating was appropriate to both the Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story time periods, as the show intercuts between the two. This meant digging into a lot of historical references and working closely with the Art Department to make sure we were correctly representing the time period and helping to serve the narrative,” McLaren explains.
Whilst historical accuracy was a running theme throughout Outpost’s work, the team undertook a wide range of VFX sequences, from subtle invisible VFX that added a little bit of Bridgerton magic, to full-CG assets, digi doubles, and complex camera takeovers.
“Perhaps one of the biggest challenges the team faced was in episode 1. We were tasked with creating a seamless transition from aerial drone footage to a studio shoot. In the sequence, the camera enters the Queen’s carriage, travelling from the exterior to the interior through a CG window,” explains McLaren.
“We were involved in all stages of this shoot: pre-planning, previs, shooting, and then delivering final VFX shots for this sequence. This meant that although it was a challenging shot, we were able to deliver a very successful seamless transition stitching the two plates together,” McLaren continues.
Another key element of our work on Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story was crowd replication for a number of shots. “The methodology for this was both a traditional approach of tiling crowd elements plates and sprites from 2nd unit shoots as well as populating sequences with digi doubles,” McLaren explains.
“Outpost spent time shooting motion capture and a library built to suit a number of scenarios. The challenge here was to make sure the postures and performance were appropriate for the time,” McLaren continues.
“Often our crowd agents would be intermingling with the extras in the plate, which made it essential to get all the details right,” adds Outpost CG Supervisor, Mikael Pettersén. “We thankfully had a lot of set photos that we could reference when we were modelling the crowd assets. We also dedicated a day of mocap specific to the different environments to ensure nothing would stand out.
“An aspect of crowd that can make your shots unpredictable and slow to work with is relying on simulation to move the agents,” Pettersén continues. “Therefore, we built a toolset that eliminated the need for simulating the crowd. This was fed into a CFX framework that automatically picked up anything tagged as cloth and ran a simulation. This workflow allowed us to switch out characters easily and quickly iterate a shot.”
Utilising DMP, our 2D team also helped transform a green screen set into the iconic balcony appearance where King George and Queen Charlotte are formally introduced for the first time as a married couple. Using reference from various well-known cathedrals and churches with intricate stain glasswork, our 2D artists set about creating stained-glass windows in the doors behind, as well as creating the structural stone pillars of the building behind, to create a key moment in the Queen Charlotte storyline.
Outpost VFX Producer, Megan Smith, adds: “Having our VFX Supervisors Roni Rodrigues and John McLaren on set and establishing a strong relationship with Director Tom Verica throughout the shoot provided our team with in-depth knowledge of the style and approaches we would take when moving into post. Teaming this with reference from the previous two seasons of Bridgerton gave us a much better understanding of what Tom envisioned for the series.”
Outpost’s 2D and 3D departments also worked on enhancing environments through creating period-accurate London buildings for the city’s skyline, adding CG foliage to buildings to give them the well-known Bridgerton look and feel, and other elements such as DMP portrait paintings and CG chandeliers.
You can watch Outpost’s work on Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story on Netflix, all episodes are available to stream now.
