Damon Lindelof's landmark HBO series — a bold, original sequel to Alan Moore's groundbreaking graphic novel. Set in an alternate history where masked vigilantes are outlawed and the legacy of white supremacy tears through American culture, Watchmen is one of the most acclaimed television events of the decade.
Winner of eleven Emmy Awards, the series pushed the boundaries of prestige television through its ambitious scale, political complexity and extraordinary visual ambition.
Watchmen was Future Associate's first project — the production that established the studio. We delivered 50+ VFX shots across the series, centred on the sequences featuring Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons) in and around his castle estate.
/ The Problem — Jeremy Irons Can't Get to Wales
The early episodes of Watchmen feature Adrian Veidt — Ozymandias — isolated in a lavish castle estate. Production had identified Penrhyn Castle in Wales as the location. It was the right place. The problem was that Jeremy Irons was based in the United States and couldn't travel to Wales when the location was available.
Rather than compromise on either the actor or the location, we developed a virtual production solution to bring the castle to him.
/ Penrhyn Castle — Scanning and Floor Plans
We travelled to Penrhyn Castle with the writers and executive producers and engaged a scanning team to capture the building in full. A drone team shot exterior footage and scanned the castle walls. The interior team worked through every room we intended to use — geometry, textures, architectural detail.
Penrhyn is an active museum. We couldn't move furniture, alter the space, or make any physical changes. We photographed everything as it stood, then worked with the scanning team to digitally strip all the freestanding furniture from the model — leaving clean architectural shells with only the fixed wall pieces remaining. Those stripped spaces were the environments we would dress and shoot into.
From the scan data, the scanning company produced detailed floor plans of each room — precise dimensions, wall positions, door openings. Those floor plans became the foundation of our virtual production setup.
/ The Virtual Production Setup — Atlanta Metro Studios
Production was based at Atlanta Metro Studios. We took the Penrhyn floor plans and marked them out on the studio floor — precisely, to scale. Every doorway, every wall junction, every architectural threshold. The cast and camera team could walk the space and understand exactly where they were in the castle, where they could cross a threshold, where a wall would be behind them.
On the studio roof, we installed tracking markers so the system knew the camera's precise position in 3D space at all times. We ran a real-time version of the castle environment that updated as the camera moved — lens changes, camera moves, position shifts all registered. Via live keying on set, the director and cinematographer could see a working version of the composite as they shot. They knew what the background would look like and could make decisions in the room rather than waiting for post.
Jeremy Irons and the surrounding cast were shot against green screen at close quarters. The immediate set pieces — tables, chairs, key props — were physically present. Everything beyond that was digital.
/ The VFX Build — Nuke Projection Pipeline
Back in Sydney, we built the final environments in Nuke. The textured geometry from the scanning team was loaded directly into Nuke and rendered through its scanline renderer, projecting the castle's photographic textures onto the scanned geometry. Camera tracking was completed in Nuke, locking the CG environment to each plate.
The sequences covered a wide range of shot types — wide establishing shots of the grand hall, medium shots of Veidt with his servants, typewriter close-ups, profile shots, table sequences. Some shots required practical extensions — the dining table was lengthened digitally to match the visual scale the production needed. Across the fifty-plus shots, the work ranged from complex spatial composites in the grand hall to relatively contained dialogue backgrounds, each grounded in the same scanned geometry and projected texture pipeline.
The result was a castle interior that was, by every practical measure, impossible to shoot — built from a museum five thousand miles from the actor, delivered through a pipeline we established for this production and have continued to develop ever since.