Glitch
Season 3

The series finale centres on a climactic bushfire that consumes the narrative and its characters. Shot in the evening with minimal practical fire beyond a single actor's torch, the entire sequence was built in post using layered library elements.

We constructed the bushfire using high-resolution fire and smoke elements from our library, layering them systematically from foreground to deep background to create volumetric depth. On set, the lighting team placed subtle practicals into the bush to pick out tree shapes and silhouettes — those illuminated forms became the anchors for our layering strategy. We cut rotoscoped mattes to individual trees, inserting fire, then smoke, then fire again, building the sense of a fire front moving through layered vegetation rather than a flat wall advancing toward camera. Floating embers from our library were scattered throughout to ground the sequence in physical reality.

All characters were manually rotoscoped into the composite, as no blue or green screen was available. We shifted the sky from blue to warm orange and deep red, wrapping the characters in the visual impression of being surrounded by inferno. The showrunner described the bushfire as the gates of hell — a symbolic threshold between worlds. The colour grading and compositional choices reinforced that metaphor throughout.

A roadside fire danger sign was updated to CATASTROPHIC — a single composited text change that tracked the escalating stakes of the sequence across multiple shots.

The series' dramatic conclusion required two characters to be stripped of life and reduced to ash in front of the advancing fire. This sequence demanded a full digital takeover of the live action plates.

We began with character scans and measurements, and importantly, we collected the actual costumes worn on set — photographing their textures in detail and modelling the jewellery, watches, and boots that would be left behind. The showrunner's vision was specific: the characters would have all moisture sucked from their bodies, their physical forms collapsing to ash, whilst their clothing remained unaffected — only the garments and footwear would remain as evidence of their presence.

For Sergeant James Hayes (Patrick Brammall), we sent the actor to a scanning booth and acquired a detailed facial scan with two different poses — one with his mouth slightly open to give us control over the final expression. We extracted that scanned head and composited it onto a digital double body built from the character data. As the life was pulled from the figure, the face underwent the moisture loss effect before the entire body transitioned to ash. The ash simulation was built in Houdini FX and rendered out for compositing. We shot this moment from two angles: one where the character collapses in place, the other where the ash disperses toward camera, giving the sequence visual variety across cuts.

In the goldfields of regional Victoria, we encountered the ruins of a historical water wheel — the brickwork foundation still standing at the location where quartz was once crushed to extract gold. Production had constructed a partial set next to the remaining stonework. Our task was to complete the environment.

We built the wooden water wheel digitally and extended the roof of the attached house — a structure originally made of tree branches and bark. We dressed the scene with a chimney and smoke rising from it, and populated the area with additional figures around the hut to suggest the scale of this mining operation. The result was a fully realised period environment that grounded the narrative moment in historical authenticity.

Three separate insect-based effects appeared across the series, each requiring different approaches.

The first was a symbolic sequence where ants and bugs scattered across the ground were composited into precise formations — patterns that carried meaning within the show's visual language. We took production photography of scattered insects and multiplied them, arranging the duplicates into the required shape.

The second was a direct attack. A character stands in a smoke-filled forest as insects swarm her. We sourced live action bug elements from stock photography, layering them across multiple passes. Her face was tracked throughout her movement so that we could attach certain insects directly to her as she collapsed to the ground. As she fell, the bugs multiplied in density, forming a writhing hive on top of her body. We used noise and mute operations to randomise the movement of bug textures in the overhead shot, and maintained flying insects between camera and subject to reinforce the idea that the swarm had not yet passed. The final image — a woman consumed by insects — was built from a combination of digital matte painting, live action bug elements, and careful tracking work.

The third sequence involved rapid decomposition of roadkill animals. We photographed prop animals positioned at the roadside and, using 2D techniques in Nuke, accelerated their decay. We cut holes into the bodies and composited in fast-moving bug elements to suggest the time-lapse destruction of flesh. We then warped the textures of the animals, making them sink and flatten as they collapsed inward, with holes expanding to show fur and skin separating. The bodies didn't simply collapse — they dispersed into their surroundings, gradually becoming indistinguishable from the earth as decomposition completed. This approach applied to multiple animal carcasses throughout the sequence.

Later, we returned to decomposing birds. Stock time-lapse footage of decomposed birds was cut out and composited over hero bird photography supplied by production, blending the two sources to create a seamless accelerated decay effect.

Glitch's premise demanded that the returned characters carry visible marks of their supernatural existence — and several sequences required effects that had no practical counterpart on set.

Fractal patterns were composited into a character's eyes — geometric formations tracked precisely to the iris and pupil across movement. Separately, wounds were shown healing at accelerated speed: we animated the wound closing frame by frame, blending the injury texture back into clean skin using 2D warping and grading in Nuke until no trace remained.

A water droplet suspended in mid-air — held motionless as a character reaches out to touch it — was built as a 2D composite element, stabilised against the background and tracked to the moment of contact. The glitch lens effect, a visual motif used across multiple shots to signal supernatural interference, was created as a repeatable lens aberration composite applied in Nuke to register the moments where the rules of the world broke down.

Taser wires were also added across an action sequence — animated wires connecting the weapon to their targets, requiring both the addition of new wires and the removal of practical elements in the same shot to land the effect cleanly.

Several sequences required blood and wound compositing, each solved through 2D tracking and roto work in Nuke.

For a character with injuries to their back, we used Nuke's motion vector system to track the movement of the character's back as they moved through frame. Motion vectors created a directional map of the surface, allowing us to attach wound patches and additional blood to the moving target with precision — the effects stayed locked to the character's anatomy regardless of their motion.

A floating body in a river required rotoscoping and careful grading to establish blood dispersing through the water around the corpse. Knife effects were achieved through blade extensions and wound patches tracked to characters, allowing knives to be drawn from bodies through simple but effective 2D extensions in Nuke.

The city lights sequence was one of the more elaborate 2D compositing tasks on the show. A full Melbourne skyline needed to move through several states across multiple cuts: lights flickering irregularly, then forming a glitch pattern, then the entire city cutting to total darkness, stars becoming visible overhead, before power gradually returned. We built matte painting passes for each state and animated the transitions between them in Nuke — blending lit and unlit versions to simulate the randomness of a grid failing district by district.

Red dust featured prominently across several episodes as both an atmospheric and supernatural signifier — dust storms building on the horizon, red particles settling across tree lines and vehicle surfaces. We layered dust elements over wide shots and close-ups, grading them to sit within the warm red-orange palette of the landscape sequences. A super moon — seen through smoke-filled sky and later from inside a moving van — was composited into exterior shots to reinforce the otherworldly atmosphere of the fire-affected environment.

Throughout the afternoon approach of the bushfire, we layered additional smoke elements across wide drone shots and ground-level plates to enhance the sense of scale and inevitability — the fire advancing across hours of daylight before reaching its climactic evening confrontation.