A young Iranian mother and her six-year-old daughter find refuge in an Australian women's shelter during the two weeks of the Iranian New Year (Nowruz).
Future Associate delivered a focused package of fire and smoke VFX across a small number of shots. The work split across two types of sequence — interior atmospheric smoke, and an exterior house fire with a practical fire hose element added in Houdini. Pipeline: Nuke, Houdini FX, Redshift, and our in-house element library.
/ Interior — Atmospheric Smoke
Several of our shots were long interior takes — wide and mid shots inside the house as the fire takes hold. The challenge here was atmospheric: filling the space with smoke that felt physically present without overwhelming the performances happening within it. We pulled from our in-house element library — around 30TB of fire, smoke and atmospheric material built up across years of production — selecting and layering elements that gave the right density and movement for the space. The result is smoke that behaves like smoke in a real structure: hanging in corners, catching light, drifting through doorways.
It's the same approach we've refined across fire-heavy productions like Fires and La Brea — library-led, compositor-driven, grounded in real elements.
/ Exterior — House Fire & Houdini Water
The exterior burning shot combined library fire and smoke elements with a Houdini FX water simulation. Production had a fireman on set with a hose — we needed to give that hose something to do: a pressurised stream of water arcing onto the burning house and interacting with the structure on contact.
We built the water sim in Houdini FX, rendering in Redshift. The sim needed to feel like it had real force behind it — the stream hitting the face of the building, breaking up on the roof tiles, and finding its way into the guttering. We ran collision geometry for both the roof surface and the gutter line, so the water trickled and pooled in the right places rather than just disappearing on impact. The fire and smoke from the library was composited around it in Nuke, with the water cutting through the smoke believably as it lands.