Freefolk announces their delivery of a significant award of stunning VFX as a lead vendor on KAOS for Netflix and SISTER.
The long-awaited series starring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, is a darkly funny, contemporary spin on Greek myths, and after starting production back in 2021, it has landed on the streaming platform to five star reviews.
The Freefolk crew were led by VFX Supervisor Steve Murgatroyd, CG Supervisor Harin Hirani, VFX Executive Producer Meg Guidon and VFX Producer Hannah Dakin and VFX Coordinator Regan Perry.
Their body of work involved creating a stunning fully CG Mount Olympus, the series opening shot and home of Zeus. As well as the mountain itself and Zeus’s palace, their VFX team built the surrounding cloudscape, atmospheric fog elements and distant clouds to complete the environment.
Being tasked with not only the first shot of the series but also establishing Zeus’ decadent dwelling, was incredibly exciting and challenging. It needed to be both breath-taking and believable as well as feel immense, lavish, rich and beautiful.
The surface of the mountain was hand sculpted and based on references with additional rocks and stones layered on top. Each and every tree, plant and bush scattered on the mountain was carefully considered, mixing up rich and vibrant greens of Cyprus trees with pockets of warm pink from the wisteria that decorate the walls of the gardens and mansion.
We built a number of bespoke set dressing assets, like fountains, statues and garden furniture, all of these small details were key in making it feel like a real living place.
Steve Murgatroyd, VFX Supervisor at Freefolk
The team also developed the dramatic thunderstorms orchestrated by the king of gods and to make this extreme weather work, the VFX team had to have control over the composition of the clouds as well as the speed at which they developed.
We generated several cloud simulations in Houdini starting from birth to over 3000 frames, these were then randomly rotated, scaled, offset and pieced together to create the larger storm structure. We were then able to retime these caches on a per shot basis to get the speed we wanted. Other cloud layers were done procedurally like the distant ones and the surrounding base clouds the storm sat on.
One of the particular challenges for this sequence was storms are usually seen from below, at ground level, where they appear dark as they are dense and block the light but in this sequence we are looking at the storm from above. To tell the story we had to creatively darken the shadows of the clouds in compositing to make them appear dense and stormy and show their progression.
Harin Hirani, CG Supervisor at Freefolk
Other key work included creating the Frame on the river Lethe, and the increasing amount of people who had to pass through on their way to ‘renewal’, Prometheus’ Cliff, a huge concert stadium with crowd replication, Hera’s collection of Tacita’s tongues, a CG gold statue of Zeus and beautifully lavish flora and fauna as well as numerous other crucial VFX.
KAOS is currently streaming on Netflix. Watch the full VFX breakdown reel here.
