The rebooted Heartbreak High returns for Season 2 — back at Hartley High with Amerie navigating reputation, love, and the chaos of adolescence. The season debuted on Netflix in 2024, spending three weeks in Netflix's global Top 10 and accumulating 50 million viewing hours.
Shot in Sydney, the series called on Future Associate for a centrepiece VFX sequence in episode eight — a pyrotechnic set piece that had to look fully convincing on screen.
Future Associate delivered the fire and smoke sequences for episode eight — a blend of practical and digital effects designed to be photorealistic under close scrutiny. CG smoke was camera-tracked and rebuilt in 3D, with virtual pyrotechnics and flame generated using EmberGen particle simulation. The centrepiece: the Flaming Richard — a phallic fire trail burned into Hartley High's oval, hand-drawn in Houdini and composited to read as entirely practical.
/ CG Smoke — Camera Tracking & Virtual Sets
The smoke sequences in episode eight needed to do something practical smoke on set can't reliably deliver: stay exactly where you put it and respond correctly to a camera that has already been shot. Our approach was to remove smoke entirely from the practical photography and rebuild it as a fully digital element — handing the production team complete control over density, direction and movement in post.
Every camera move on set was tracked and rebuilt in 3D. Props, set pieces and the characters themselves were represented as geometry inside our virtual environment, so when we generated smoke in EmberGen, it could behave correctly — flowing around objects, interacting with surfaces, responding to the spatial logic of the real location rather than drifting unconvincingly across a flat plate.
We pre-filled our virtual sets with smoke before rolling camera on a digital recreation of each take. The rendered output was composited over the live-action plates — blending digital and practical seamlessly. In one shot, the smoke tracks directly to the movement of the ceiling, a detail that reads as entirely physical on screen. Virtual, colour-matched lighting was built into the 3D environments to replicate in-shot conditions — including light rays beaming through the smoke. That kind of interaction is what separates CG smoke that convinces from CG smoke you notice.
/ Virtual Fire — EmberGen & Burning Hartley High
The fire work ran parallel to the smoke — EmberGen again, this time generating photorealistic flames both as standalone effects and to extend practical pyrotechnics already in frame. The advantage of virtual fire over large practical rigs is control: placement, scale and timing can be refined in post, without the constraints of what could safely be lit in front of a camera on the day.
Prior planning was essential. Stand-in lighting, on-set markers, and some real fires were used during the shoot as reference — telling us how light falls, where the fire sits in the frame, and what the practical effect looks like before we augmented it. That foundation made the compositing process faster and the result more grounded in the physical reality of the set.
In several shots, practical and CGI fire run simultaneously, each doing what it does best. The practical element anchors the effect in reality; the CGI adds scale, extends the burn and solves problems the practical element can't. Knowing where to draw that line — shot by shot — is the craft.
Alongside the EmberGen simulation, our element library was central to this work. We maintain around 30TB of high resolution, high dynamic range fire, smoke, water and atmospheric plates — built up and carefully tagged across years of productions. For fire specifically, pulling the right plate for a given shot means matching flame character, height, colour temperature and motion to what the camera sees. Those library elements composited under and over the CGI layers are a significant part of what makes the combined result read as entirely physical. The same library and pipeline underpins our fire work on La Brea S3 and Nautilus.
/ The Flaming Richard
The standout shot from episode eight — and the one that generated the most conversation — is the Flaming Richard: a phallic shape traced in fire across Hartley High's school oval. It's absurd, it's funny, and it had to be completely convincing.
The process started on a tablet — hand-drawing the desired shape directly over the plate footage to establish the exact outline. That drawing became the guide in Houdini, where we animated it to spread like a real fire front: moving from ignition outward with organic variation. Thickness and procedural noise were layered in so it wouldn't read as a traced line. EmberGen handled the fire render itself.
Working this way let us iterate quickly — adjusting shape, timing and scale without heavy retouching — and the final geometry could be re-deployed across multiple shots showing the Richard from different angles. The result is a sequence that feels shot practically, without having to answer the obvious question of how you'd get a fire crew to burn that particular shape into an actual school oval.