True Lies

The bulk of the pilot's VFX package runs through a single extended helicopter chase that carries from early in the episode through to its climax. Within that we were doing two distinct types of work running side by side through the cut.

The first was helicopter driving comps: production had captured background plates of the aerial environment, and our job was to composite the characters and helicopter against those plates. The comp work had to hold consistently through a long cut, same light, same integration, same read, regardless of where the camera was pointing or what was in front of the lens.

The second type was set extension and cleanup. These shots had the helicopter photography as the base plate, but the environment around it needed to be extended, stabilised, and dressed for camera. Equipment visible in the practical photography was removed, and the frame was completed for finishing.

Several shots in the helicopter sequence place the action explicitly over Paris, with a digital matte painting of the city and the Eiffel Tower added to establish location. One combined the DMP with wire removal in the same pass; the other was environment only, the tower placed into the frame without additional cleanup. The DMP had to read convincingly against helicopter photography, matching the aerial perspective, the time of day, and the light conditions in the plate.

The episode's opening sequence was shot in New Orleans doubling for Paris, which meant the graffiti throughout had to read as French. The augmentation work covered two things: clearance, where existing graffiti needed to be removed or replaced, and location sell, where English text was changed to French to push the sequence toward the Parisian environment the show required.

Weapons effects run across both sequences. The gunfire was captured practically on set; muzzle flash, bullet sparks, and bullet hits were all added in comp. One shot required debris added from a wooden pole at the point of bullet impact. Another required only the muzzle flash element, with the production explicitly scoping out graffiti cleanup that would otherwise have appeared in the same shot.

The cleanup package across the pilot covers wire and camera removal, paint outs, and stunt equipment removal. Several shots through the helicopter sequence required wire or rope removed, in some cases alongside the camera rig that had captured the stunt performance. One shot added a water tower paint out to the wire work in the same pass.

Paint outs in the opening sequence covered a ferry, a painted skyline, a smoke stack, and a distinctive red band on a boat hull. These were isolated paint-out tasks, scoped individually with no additional cleanup assumed.

Several shots in the helicopter sequence were captured as studio plates: a stuntwoman on ropes above a bluescreen, looking down as she grips the helicopter skids, safety rigging throughout the frame. The environment behind her was constructed from multiple pieces of on-set photography assembled to fill the frame. Matching vehicle positions across the constructed background was a central continuity concern, and a figure was added to the roof of one of the cars in the frame. The graffiti augmentation running through the rest of the sequence was extended into the built environment so the background read consistently with the surrounding shots. Camera shake was added to the studio plate to push it toward something that feels like it was captured outdoors rather than on a stage.

The stunt removal work covered two distinct jobs. One required crash boxes removed from the tail of the shot, safety equipment that had been in frame at the end of the take. The other was more involved: the stuntman needed to be removed from the frame entirely, with the environment reconstructed behind him. The production VFX supervisor had identified a section of the same take pulled from before the helicopter lifts off as a potential background fill, and that earlier section was used to cover the stuntman's position in the frame.