States of Mind

States of Mind was shot primarily at Camelot — a heritage-listed Victorian mansion on Kirkham Lane in Narellan, on the outer south-western edge of Sydney. Designed by John Horbury Hunt and built between 1881 and 1888, the house is an ornate Gothic Victorian structure with a complex tiled roof, elaborate eaves and a strong architectural presence that sits at the centre of the film. Production shot inside, outside, and across the surrounding grounds.

Our involvement went beyond the VFX brief — we also handled the digital dailies for the shoot and had a team member on set throughout. Getting a thorough understanding of the location early was essential to the work that followed. We sent out a drone team and captured the full exterior of Camelot at multiple elevations, flying the drone around the building systematically to build a complete photographic dataset. Those photos were processed into a textured 3D model through photogrammetry, giving us an accurate mesh of the house that matched the real-world geometry shot by shot.

That mesh became the foundation of our tracking pipeline. We used KeenTools GeoTracker — a plugin inside Nuke — to align our cameras and build effective camera tracks across every shot in the sequence. GeoTracker does a tremendous job of locking cameras to complex real-world geometry, and having a high-quality textured model of Camelot made that process considerably more reliable.

The central challenge of States of Mind was a transformation: the main exterior sequence was shot during the day under clear blue skies, and every shot needed to become a rain-soaked night exterior with a full storm atmosphere. The entire conversion was handled in Nuke.

The day-for-night grade came first — pushing the plates into darkness while retaining the detail and texture of the Camelot exterior. Every shot then received a sky replacement, dropping in stormy skies that gave the sequence its atmosphere and provided the base for the lightning work that followed.

Once we had a usable mesh of Camelot in Houdini, we ran a rain simulation — building not just the falling droplets but a wetness map that tracked the sheen of accumulated water across the building's surfaces. Camelot is not a simple geometry — the ornate tiled roof, the Victorian detailing, the varied planes of the facade all needed the wetness to follow their specific contours convincingly. That wetness map was integrated into the composite on top of the graded plates. Wet window textures from our library — beads of water running down glass — were composited into every window across the building.

For the close-up shots, 2D water drip elements from our library were placed to look like water running off the eaves of the house. The combination of the rain simulation, the wetness map, the window dressing and the drip elements work together across different focal lengths — each approach appropriate to what the camera is doing in that shot.

We rendered dedicated lightning passes of Camelot to use in compositing, giving us control over how each strike illuminates the building's surface independently of the sky element. This meant the timing of a flash on the house could be locked to the same flash in the sky — everything reading as part of the same event rather than separately composited elements.

Each lightning strike was treated according to its perceived distance from the building. A close strike reads very differently to a distant one — the brightness, the directionality, the effect on the atmosphere and the raindrops all change with distance. Sometimes we see the bolt itself. Other times it's a flash behind the camera, or a diffuse glow behind cloud cover. The sky elements, the atmosphere, the rain and the wet glass on the windows each respond differently to each strike, and calibrating all of those interactions shot by shot was one of the more detailed aspects of the sequence.

The story of States of Mind turns on a body-swap conceit: human minds transferred into two animals, a rat and a demon possum, both of which needed to be fully CG and convincing enough to carry dramatic weight in the sequence.

For the rat, we worked from a stock CG base mesh, rigging and animating the creature in Maya before lighting and rendering in Houdini. It needed to read as a real rat behaving with human intentionality — something slightly wrong about the way it moves.

The demon possum was a more involved build. Production supplied a base mesh, and we took it from there — adding fur and surfacing in Substance, rigging the creature for fur simulation in Houdini FX, and rendering in Redshift. The groom was specifically designed to look matted and wet, sitting within the rain environment rather than reading as a dry animal dropped into a wet scene. The wet fur matting required careful attention — fur behaves very differently when saturated, clumping and losing its volume, and getting that right was essential to the creature feeling physically present in the storm.

The demon possum is animated crawling across a power cable towards the rat — a tense, deliberate movement that needed to read as purposeful. The cable itself becomes the site of the sequence's key action: the possessed rat must reconnect a loose electrical cable, and 2D spark effects from our library were composited in to sell the electrical danger of that moment.

States of Mind required blood and gore work alongside the environment and creature pipeline. The most involved moment is a hand-severing sequence — a character's hand is chopped off and briefly remains in contact with the body before dropping to the ground. We added blood drips coming off the hand during that suspended moment, small details that do disproportionate work in selling the physicality of the injury. There was also a broader package of sky replacements across the film to support the stylised visual language the production was after.