Dangerous
Animals

Dangerous Animals was an impressive script from the moment we first read it — and we always knew it would be a significant production challenge. The core task was creating multiple species of fully CG sharks and placing them convincingly in the ocean. We ended up building four different shark species across the production.

The ocean itself was as demanding as the sharks. Every shot required the CG water to match the plate — and the plate conditions were constantly changing. Wind direction, lighting, wave height all varied from location to location and scene to scene. Getting our CG ocean to sit seamlessly inside the real ocean footage was a critical detail that ran across the entire show.

In several scenes, Tucker — the film's antagonist — uses chum to draw the sharks in. The chum is a mixture of blood and body parts from one of his victims, dumped into the water to attract the sharks. We had to build this effect from scratch: floating organic material, blood dispersal in water, and the full chum cloud that the sharks swim through.

The location work added another layer of complexity. Plates were shot across multiple distinct environments — a bay, a dock, and a swimming pool for close-up character work — all of which needed to read as a single, consistent world. We worked hard to pull the ocean plates into alignment across all three settings.

To give the colourist the control needed to unify everything in the grade, we delivered multiple passes — chum, sharks and water all broken out separately. We also provided full character mattes and shark mattes for each shot, giving grading the flexibility to balance the elements independently and achieve a consistent look across the film.

Many of the film's most tense moments required the sharks to pass in extremely close proximity to Zephyr and Moses. Getting that integration right meant paying careful attention to a long list of physical details simultaneously — caustic light patterns, wind direction, surface wave height, and the interaction between the characters and the water around them.

One detail that particularly elevated the realism was character shadows. When a shark rises close to either character, their body casts shadows onto it — a subtle but grounding effect that anchors the CG animal to the real photography in a way audiences may not consciously notice, but would absolutely feel the absence of.

Our pipeline for this work was Houdini FX for water and chum simulations and lighting, Redshift for rendering, and Nuke for compositing.

Zephyr is established as a confident, capable surfer. Hassie Harrison delivered a compelling performance — but surfing professionally is its own discipline entirely. One approach we took to help sell her character on the water was building a CG breaking wave behind her as she paddles. It's a shot the team is particularly proud of.

The director also identified two stock shots of a genuinely talented surfer that he wanted to use as character introduction material. These were HD plates that needed significant work to become part of the film: upscaled using an AI upscaler that restored fine detail in the water, graded, and extended with environment additions. Beyond the broader visual work, the details mattered — her costume needed adjustment, her hair needed to be shortened, and the surfboard had to match the production board exactly. That meant adding a decal of angel wings to the underside of the board and painting in the black edges along the rails.

The harder problem in both shots was the face — the surfer in the footage wasn't Hassie Harrison. Hassie was scanned in a photogrammetry booth — giving us a precise digital model of her face and high dynamic range reference photography. From that we ran an AI face-swap, and the result reads as Zephyr from the first frame.

The nighttime shark attack sequences represent some of the most complex work Future Associate has undertaken. They are a demonstration of assets, tracking, animation, simulation, lighting, surfacing and compositing all operating in concert — and pushing each other to their limits.

On set, the actor was placed in the water in a harness attached to cables, which were used to pull her through the water and physically simulate a shark attack. Our task was to take that footage and make it real. We fully isolated her movement through roto-animation, tracked the camera, and rotoscoped her entire body — before beginning work on the sharks themselves.

The shark animation had to work in two directions at once: the sharks needed to match the director's desired choreography, and they needed to plausibly explain why Zephyr was being pulled in the directions the cables had dictated. That meant inventing creative shark movement that justified the physical performance already captured on the day — building a believable cause for an effect that had already been shot.

The film's climax called for a massive shark — enormous in scale, breaking the ocean surface and swimming past Zephyr, who is strung up above the water. After Tucker takes a harpoon through the heart, the shark needs to come up, take him, and drag him down to the ocean floor.

We found a high-speed stock plate of a leaping great white shark and retimed the footage to fit the edit. We then built a full digital double of Tucker — groomed with his curly hair, dressed in his wet costume, with a harpoon through his chest, covered in blood, and rigged to deliver the specific facial and body performance the director wanted. The digital Tucker was then placed directly into the shark's mouth.

The compositing challenge here was enormous. Isolating and integrating the original high-speed great white plate was only the beginning. We roto-animated the shark, then ran a high-speed water simulation of the animal breaching the surface. A separate blood simulation was built for the wound — calibrated so the right volume of blood spills from Tucker as he's taken under. Battle scars were tracked and added to the shark's body to create continuity with other footage in the sequence.

As with the rest of the show's most demanding shots, we delivered multiple passes to grading — giving the finishing team extensive control over the final look of one of the film's most technically ambitious frames.