Dev Patel's directorial debut — a visceral, kinetic action film inspired by the legend of Hanuman. A young man who has spent years in hiding launches a ruthless one-man war of vengeance against the corrupt leaders who murdered his mother.
Produced by Jordan Peele for Universal Pictures, Monkey Man is a stunning debut — equal parts spiritual odyssey and ultra-violent action spectacle, shot across India and Australia.
Future Associate delivered 30+ VFX shots across the production, with our central contribution being the hotel fight sequence — axe replacement, plate stitching, wallpaper and plaster destruction, and practical element integration.
/ The Hotel Fight
Before any VFX work could begin, the sequence required substantial plate work. The fight was shot across multiple takes from multiple angles, and our first task was stitching those plates into continuous shots — dual screening and combining disparate takes into something coherent enough to build on.
The central element is the axe. Production used a lightweight stunt axe on the day — the right call for a sequence this fast and physical — but a lightweight axe behaves like one. It bounces on impact, fails to dig in, floats where it should sink. Our job was to sell the weight.
The process for each axe shot followed the same logic: paint the stunt axe out of the plate, restore whatever it was covering — floor, wall, Dev Patel's hands and arms — then track the camera in Nuke X and paint a heavier axe back in, mapped to the moving floor and the shake of the Steadicam. No bounce. The axe hits and stays. We added dirt, dust and debris to key impacts — particularly the shot where the axe comes down next to Patel's head — to give the contact the physical weight it needed.
For the wood textures on the table, we had a useful resource nearby. There's an axe-throwing venue right next door to our studio — we borrowed some split wood, photographed it, and used those textures directly in the shot.
The other major element was the wall drag — the axe tearing across the surface and taking wallpaper and plaster with it. We built a digital recreation of the character and environment, traced the axe movement frame by frame to establish a precise path, then used Houdini's Vellum solver to simulate the wallpaper tearing from the surface with dust and plaster chips driven by the same sim. Production provided on-set reference footage of a real axe being dragged through wallpaper-covered drywall — we took elements of that real damage, warped it, and combined it with the 3D simulation to get the final look.