Creatures

Digital doubles of Custode and the pirate crew — built from character scans, rigged, and handed to the FX team for a Houdini fragmentation and soft-tissue destruction sequence. Fragmentation simulation driving structural collapse with flesh and soft-tissue layered on top.

Lucy's drug trip creature work: leech population procedurally placed across a decomposing body using Houdini, with hero leeches individually animated. Body decomposition driven by Houdini simulation. A fern of the species that appears in the shots was procured for direct reference by the FX team — it now lives in the studio.

Four fully CG shark species — built, surfaced, rigged and animated for close-proximity interaction with actors in open water. Character shadows cast onto the sharks from Zephyr and Moses above. A digital double of Tucker placed directly in the mouth of a great white for the film's climax.

Creature work across the studio's largest engagement with the NCIS franchise to date.

The Blue Wren — a fully CG Splendid Fairy-wren appearing as an omen across multiple episodes of the most-watched Australian Netflix production to date. Built from production reference stills and video, with physical scale models on set giving the director and DP accurate blocking reference.

A photorealistic CG cow matched coat-for-coat and muscle-for-muscle from live-action footage of the production animal. Deployed wherever working with the real cow wasn't practical — indoors, outdoors, and in a water tank with a full Houdini fluid simulation driven by the CG cow as a collider.

A demon possum — built from a production base mesh, surfaced in Substance, rigged for fur simulation in Houdini FX with a wet matted groom designed for the rain environment. A CG rat built from a stock mesh and rigged in Maya. Both creatures carry the intentionality of human minds inside animal bodies.

Sawtooth Jack — a hybrid creature preserving the in-camera performance of an actor in costume. 3D scans of the actor used to build a warp model deforming the plate footage into skeletal proportions. Selective CG patches applied where the deformation alone wasn't reading: glowing head, fire, close-up facial animations.

A falcon and a huia — both fully CG, built from native New Zealand bird anatomy research. A 30-second mid-flight hunt sequence directed in-studio by the late Lee Tamahori. One of the most sustained feathered creature animation sequences in Australian VFX.

A CGI digital double of the actor built from on-set scans and animated through a van crash sequence — rigged, textured and composited with secondary destruction elements.

Three goblins — Seth, Jessica and Stephen — digitally scanned and their likenesses morphed into stationary objects. Rosie's full goblin transformation built as a human-to-goblin morph with production-matched speed ramps. CG ears growing on an actor's head, tracked and lit against HDRI reference captured on set.