Reef Break

Our first task was the Eastland refinery fire — a massive day exterior disaster sequence. Production had done their best on the day, deploying flame bars and running gas fires across the set, but the scene demanded something far larger. The showrunner wanted the scale of a genuine catastrophe, and that required an enormous amount of fire and smoke added in post to close the gap between what was shot and what the story required.

This was one of our first major fire jobs. We were able to build on work we'd done on Glitch S3 — not a similar scene, but a production that had also required fire work and helped us develop our approach. For the larger explosions within the refinery sequence, we sourced stock elements and composited them into the fixed camera shots that made up most of the wide coverage.

Because so many of the wide shots were locked off, this was fundamentally a compositing exercise — laying out 2D fire and smoke elements in a way that made spatial sense given where those fires would realistically originate and spread across the refinery. We covered the location from multiple angles: wide lenses at distance, long lenses compressing the space and pushing the scale, and tighter shots zooming into the chimney stack where we integrated live action fire elements with thick, dark black smoke to sell the impending disaster.

We kept every piece of practical fire that was in the plate and matched our wind direction and exposure levels to it. It's always better to shoot with some fire in frame rather than none — the actors and crew have something real to react to, camera and exposure decisions are made with genuine reference, and for us it tells us exactly what we need to know: wind direction shot by shot, how much smoke is actually coming off those flames, and what the exposure of the fire looks like in that specific lighting environment. That information lets us dial our library elements into the same world.

When our hero enters the burning refinery, she was met on set with flame bars, atmospheric lighting effects, and a measure of SFX pyro. Our task was to take that foundation and make the interior feel genuinely dangerous — to close the gap between the controlled conditions required for shooting with talent and the chaos the scene needed to read as.

We filled the space with 2D fire elements placed in the foreground and background, layered smoke throughout, and pulled keys on the metal surfaces inside the refinery — tinting them towards orange to reflect the surrounding fire. Flickering light effects were introduced across the frame, all handled in 2D, to amplify the sense of heat and danger. The variety of angles across the interior meant each shot had its own character, and compositors were given the latitude to find the gaps in each frame and make their own decisions about where a pocket of smoke, a scatter of sparks, or a burst of flicker would do the most work.

Fire is an evolving, unpredictable thing, and that gave us creative room. There's no single correct answer for where smoke sits or how fire moves in a space like that — which meant our compositors could put their own stamp on each shot and push the sense of danger as far as the scene would hold.

Across the later episodes, the show demanded a full range of action effects: bullet hits, glass smashes, sand explosions — all achieved with live action elements from our library, composited in Nuke.

The plane-on-the-beach sequence was a practical element that we keyed and rotoscoped, then 2D animated into the scene. Getting all of the people on the beach into the right place with the right performances required several split screens — stitching together takes to assemble the shot the edit needed. Muzzle flashes were added to every gun on the beach, and the squid and blood hits — where characters are struck — were handled entirely in VFX using live action blood elements rather than practical squibs on the actors.

One beach scene didn't have enough people on the day. We used a simple solution: cut out individual characters from the plate, colour-corrected their costumes to introduce some variety so the duplicates wouldn't read as identical, then built a 3D camera track in Nuke and placed the extracted figures as 2D cards distributed across the beach.

The trick works because the camera is moving. Static 2D card people would normally read as flat and false, but when the camera is actually travelling through the space, the parallax sells the depth and the cards sit convincingly in the environment. Mix those cards with the real moving people already in the plate and the crowd reads as full. It's a simple technique, and on a moving camera shot it's highly effective.

One sequence the production wanted to push towards night had been shot in daylight — an aerial move over water, flying in towards a house. The transformation was handled as a compositing and grading exercise. We pushed the grade darker and into cooler tones to establish the night read, then added warm interior lights inside the house, visible through the windows, to give the structure life and contrast the cold exterior. A few moonlit clouds were introduced into the sky to dress the frame and add atmosphere. The result came out well — the grade and the small additions work together to make the scene feel genuinely nocturnal.

A night sequence featuring a Jeep sliding around a corner needed a little help to feel as exciting as it should. We added tyre tracks using 2D digital matte painting, revealed progressively as the Jeep slid through the turn. Live action smoke elements were placed off the wheels to give the sense of rubber burning, and we paid careful attention to the headlights passing through that smoke — as the Jeep turns and the beam sweeps across the 2D smoke cards, the light interaction had to track and shift correctly with the vehicle's movement. Getting that lighting response right is what sells the smoke as something physically present in the scene.

The final sequence in the reel features a fire in a boat that had been converted into a dwelling. For this one, the element selection mattered. We pulled fire elements from our library specifically chosen for their window structure — elements where the shape of the fire naturally suggested something burning through a frame or opening — so that when placed against the boat's windows, the fire read as coming from inside the dwelling rather than sitting on top of it.

The elements were placed on 3D cards in Nuke using a 3D camera track, anchoring them correctly in the space as the camera moved. The scene was dressed with additional smoke to complete the atmosphere. It's a good example of how element selection does as much work as compositing technique — finding the right piece of library footage for the specific read you need saves time and produces a more convincing result.