Heat

The fire's arrival was built in stages. In the early wide shots, before it's truly close, smoke elements on the horizon were the primary tool: the distant suggestion of something coming rather than fire itself. Real bushfires announce themselves through their smoke long before the flames are visible, and matching that visual logic was the foundation of everything that followed.

As the fire front advanced, we moved into sky replacements. Stock images graded and composited to show the sky changing — the clean blue giving way to something thicker, more ominous, tinted with the particular orange that anyone who has been near a bushfire in Australia immediately recognises. During a major fire, smoke filters and diffuses sunlight so completely that the light quality shifts towards dusk even at midday. We darkened and graded the plates to match that reality — the world getting heavier and more closed-in as the fire approached.

Before the fire reaches the house directly, a gas tank explodes behind it — a punctuation mark that signals the shift from threat to catastrophe. For this shot we used a stock smoke simulation, bedded carefully behind the roofline of the hero house so the explosion appeared to originate from the correct position in the geography of the property. The goal was a single violent visual beat — something that told the audience the situation had crossed a threshold.

By the time the fire is close, every shot required significant atmosphere work. We established an orange base grade across the whole sequence — a foundational tint that everything else was built on top of, ensuring our composite elements would sit correctly in the frame without needing to be individually colour-matched from scratch.

Adding smoke at this density required extensive rotoscoping — not just for the characters moving through the frame, but also for the trees. Smoke had to layer correctly around both, which meant separating them from the background. We built a Z-depth pass for the sequence, giving us a depth map we could use in compositing to layer smoke volumes with genuine spatial logic — smoke sitting further back in the scene reading as more diffuse, foreground elements punching through it correctly.

The handheld shots were 3D camera-tracked so our elements could be positioned in the correct world space. Everything else — smoke, fire elements, embers — was handled in 2D compositing. The smoke was a combination of running stock elements and still images on cards with basic 2D animation applied. In the distance, as the fire line itself came into frame, we used a large number of small moving fire elements placed across the treeline — dozens of individual elements, each subtle on its own, combining to give the impression of fire moving through the forest behind the characters.

The climactic sequence — where one character picks up a sign and beats another with it — needed fire that was fully alive in the background without overwhelming the drama happening in the foreground. We used moving fire elements in the background with a short depth of field, so they read as a soft, flickering glow behind the action rather than demanding attention. The fire is felt more than seen in those frames.

For the house fire itself, the key was structural fire elements — stock library elements that had been captured with architecture in frame, fire rolling up vertical surfaces, catching on edges and ledges. These let us map fire specifically to the windows, doorways and ceilings of the hero house so it followed the actual geometry of the building rather than floating in front of it. The fire needed to feel like it was consuming the structure, not composited onto it.

The critical art direction decision was restraint. Setting a house on fire in VFX can easily tip into total inferno — every surface blazing, the whole thing unreadable. That wasn't the show. The fire needed to be devastating but still specific — tracking through the house in a way that kept the space legible, kept the characters readable, and served the story rather than replacing it. A 2D library-based approach, rather than full simulation, was the right call here — it gave us precise control over placement, scale and intensity on a shot-by-shot basis, which a sim wouldn't have afforded at the budget and schedule this production required. See our simulation-based fire work on La Brea S3, Heartbreak High S2 and Nautilus.

Once the fire had passed, the show needed to see what it left behind. We were given a drone plate of the hero house and used it as the base for a digital matte painting of the burnt aftermath — replacing and augmenting the structure with stock photography of fire-damaged buildings, charred timber and ash to transform the same location into a ruin. The matte painting also repositioned the house into a more remote, isolated setting — reinforcing the feeling of total exposure, the characters stripped of everything, with no one nearby and nothing left.