Bushfires, house fires, industrial explosions, pyrocumulonimbus clouds, ember storms, and everything that burns. Built from a 30TB live-action element library with Houdini and EmberGen simulation, across twelve productions and counting.
Special effects put real fire in front of a camera. Flame bars, burn pans, a controlled charge on a tree trunk. The physical anchor for the shot. Visual effects take it from there: the forest burning to the horizon, the fire front that surrounds your cast for as many takes as the director needs, the scale no safety plan could justify. Built shot by shot. Nobody gets hurt.
That gap between what's safe to shoot and what the story needs is where our fire work lives. We close it by building scale, intensity, and the specific physical logic of a fire behaving in a real environment.
Fire is the discipline we've built the deepest body of work around. From the Black Summer bushfires of Fires to the virtual pyrotechnics of Heartbreak High S2, the creature fire of Dark Harvest, and the Bodden House blaze of The Bluff.
Underpinning every fire production we take on is our in-house element library: around 30TB of high-resolution, high-dynamic-range fire, smoke, water and atmospheric plates. Built up and carefully tagged across years of production. Every element shot on professional cinema cameras at native resolution, with real fire behaving in real physical space.
On a production with schedule pressure (which is every production), being able to pull the exact element a shot needs is a large part of what makes the result read as physical. Matched for flame character, height, colour temperature and motion. The right element in the right place composts faster, reads better, and costs less to iterate.
The library is the foundation. Houdini FX simulation and EmberGen handle what the library can't give us. The two approaches combine shot by shot depending on what the scene requires.