The third and final chapter of Antoine Fuqua's Equalizer franchise, starring Denzel Washington. Robert McCall finds refuge in the sun-drenched south of Italy — until the local Camorra threatens the community he has come to call home.
A Sony Pictures release, the film was a major international production with significant VFX requirements across its action sequences — and an opportunity to send off the franchise with genuine visual impact.
150+ VFX shots across the film's most visceral sequences — wine cellar gore, a fully CGI van crash, and digital face replacements for the skylight stunt.
/ The Wine Cellar — Opening Sequence
The film opens with McCall single-handedly eliminating an entire criminal syndicate in a wine cellar — a sequence that needed to establish him immediately as someone not to be crossed. The practical edit was strong, but Future Associate's job was to push it further: bullet wounds, blood, gore, and wine spraying from barrels hit by gunfire, all added in post.
The centrepiece of the sequence is a moment where McCall drives his gun into an enemy's eye socket and shoots through him into a second target. On set, a standard sawed-off revolver was used. In post, we composited a barrel onto the weapon and added digital blood splatter landing on McCall's hand and face — keeping the camera close to what was actually shot while making it something the audience couldn't look away from.
The wine streams were built in Houdini. We animated pointed velocity bursts and used them as the driving force for a Flip simulation emitting water particles. Proxy geometry approximating the actors was brought in so the particles could collide with the characters correctly. The resulting mesh was textured and lit by our CG generalists to match the practical environment — glistening red wine catching the available light — then handed to compositing for integration into the final shot.
/ The Van Crash — Full CGI Reconstruction
Director Antoine Fuqua originally planned the van crash sequence as a composite of blue screen plates. The precision required for the character's movement through the crash — and the control that offered over performance — made a full CGI rebuild the better call. It came to us.
Our CG team worked from scans taken on set to build digital doubles of both the environment and the actor. Texturing, rigging and animation followed, with the character's movement through the crash choreographed to match the edit. The shot was completed with secondary elements: cracked windshield, smoke rising from the van's hood, blood on the surrounding surfaces.
/ Skylight Face Replacements
One of the film's most discussed sequences sees McCall drop a body through a stained glass ceiling as a message to the man below. For safety, the stunt was performed with a stunt performer wearing face protection — so the footage came to us needing a fully believable CGI face replacement composited over the plate.
On-set scans provided the base texture data for the asset. From there, our team refined the model and compositors superimposed the CGI face onto the plate, spline warping to correct for any misalignment between the scan and the live footage, then colour grading to fully seat it in the frame. A few trails of blood rolling down the face were added as a final detail — small, but the kind of thing that keeps the shot feeling real once you've already bought in.