VFX Supervisor Jean-Louis Autret about the visual effects on "Eric"

JEAN-LOUIS AUTRET: What's special about "Eric" is that, on paper, nothing predisposed the show to a lot of VFX. It's a classic case of a period series (the 80s raise the same problems today as a film set in the Middle Ages), and the amount of VFX is determined by the ability to find locations that work. I was hired by the production company, Sister Pictures, to help them bridge the gap between what the production design could provide and what we were trying to tell, with set extensions. Little by little my role grew: I had done a lot of research on New York, and I started to make suggestions for certain sequences that aimed at establishing a coherent geography for the story. In everyone's mind, including mine at the start, New York is all brick buildings and bigger buildings in the background. During the location scouting in the neighborhoods where the story takes place, I realized that this wasn't the case at all. In the neighborhood where the Anderson family lives, the buildings are only four or five-storeys high, you can see the sky, but you can't see the Empire State Building. The further you go towards Time Square and Broadway, where the TV studio is located, the buildings are higher, but still old, and towards the east, where the police station is located, the bigger the glass buildings and the image you have of New York.

Another discovery: we've all forgotten about the World Trade Center. When you see movies from the 80s and 90s, the World Trade Center is in every establisher, more than the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. There's a building that replaces it today, so it was quite easy for us to realize when it was relevant to see it: all we had to do was look up. The shot at the beginning of episode 5 where Vincent/Cumberbatch wakes up on the roof top at sunrise shows the real view from the roof, minus the buildings that are too recent and with the Twin Towers in place of One World Trade Center. We did this for several views, trying to give a coherent geography.

At the start of episode 1, Vincent and Edgar's journey from the television studio to their home was shot in four different cities: on the backlot in Budapest, on a real street in New York, a street in Newark and a street in Jersey City, from one shot to the next. We shot without a storyboard.

One notable thing that was improvised was the shot with the view of Broadway when they come out of the studio. Too many elements were telling that this wasn't New York and, having spent so much time with New Yorkers, I knew that I had no right to make mistakes. We knew we were going to roto everything out and add floors to the backlot buildings. I thought, if we're going to do that, we might as well create a real avenue, take advantage of this curve that we'll never be able to hide, and since it's the only curved avenue and that's what it's all about, let's go for it! It was improvised on the day of the shoot: I looked at the rehearsal, I saw the frame, I suggested, is it OK if we do that? OK... The backlot in Budapest is like a lot of backlots in different countries, all built in the same way, which is practical but doesn't work very well when you want to evoke cities like New York: there's always a building blocking the end of the street. But there's no such thing in New York: you always have a perspective. In discussions with Lucy Forbes, Benedict and the producer, we said that since we had to add 3D elements to add the missing floors, wouldn't it be more relevant and impactful to make a shot with a perspective? The viewer no longer wonders whether we're in New York or not, and for the remaining shots of the sequence we agree on tighter shots to restore the financial balance. That's the choice we've made in many cases, and working with Ben and Lucy was great, because they were very aware of all that, and never tried to push the limits too far. It's the first time I've worked so cooperatively with a director and a cinematographer.

The success of the collaboration has as much to do with the production framework as with the people: Sister Pictures is a production that gives creative space, but Ben Spence has done low-budget work before, and he knows that not playing within the framework we give him would go against his cinematography. He trusted me straight away and that made the job easier. We'd talk about lighting, and I'd show him location scouting images and Photoshop mock-ups to give him an idea and a direction. My role is to pass all that on to the studios that are going to build the VFX. NVIZ in London did the set extensions. I must pay tribute to BELOFX, which took over from NVIZ, which closed down during production, and was able to ensure the continuity of the work and deliver it on time, thanks in particular to William Foulser and Tamar Chatterjee (on 3D objects), who worked with me from January 2023 up until delivery in March 2024. It was the two of them who succeeded in making the images what they are. For a show that's not supposed to rely on VFX, there are still 670 VFX shots. I worked full time from 20 November 2022 until the end of March 2024. A lot of people think that the work starts when you plug in the computer, but the commitment is much longer.

The waste processing center overlooks the west side of Manhattan, so I went to shoot some plates with a plate unit - with a RED Komodo and the 21mm from the Supreme set - on the other side of the Hudson River for a few days. Everything that happens there was shot on location in Budapest, and New York was then added in the background on a few shots.

The night shot of the departing barge is full 3D, the only element shot is the character sitting on the garbage heap. The rest is completely CG.

DUPE VFX took care of all the TV screens, and that's an important part of the story. Our problem was that all the CCTV footage was going to be shot in New York, in the last month of shooting. What's more, we were shooting with TV sets from the time, which were supposed to be American; and we were in Budapest, with a different voltage... It was complicated to display an image on most of these TVs, even if they could display at least a white image. I came up with a system where, during the shoot, we would broadcast a grey image on these old TVs to get the luminance, and Ben would use it as practical lighting. For each setup, I'd play a short 30-second reel in the TVs, including a distortion grid, a Macbeth chart, a grey scale, etc. A specialist service provider in Budapest had designed a system that allowed us to stream it from a computer, using an analogue machine and the signal from the TV aerial. In New York, we shot the remote surveillance footage with Alexa Minis (so that we could have three cameras at the same time). Then came the question of how to process all this: we could spend weeks trying to achieve the look of a VHS tape, going back and forth endlessly on blur level and color, not forgetting the narrative challenge: we had to reveal certain elements and faces at the right moments, without giving the impression that they'd pressed a button to enhance the image... I suggested organising a color-grading session: we put the images filmed by the Alexa Mini into the Baselight, an analogue machine at the output of the Baselight to send the signal to a tube TV set, refilmed by an Alexa 35 whose image is sent back to a 4K monitor, in front of which we sit everyone who might have an opinion on what these surveillance cameras might look like, and we do a live color-grading session. I was remote from Paris, with a stream view from Baselight. A week later we reorganized a day's shooting with a broadcast monitor from the era, a bad quality TV and an intermediate screen, where we broadcast all the graded rushes and filmed the TVs in full, as well as this chart reel, which enabled us to remove the distortion from the screens and reapply it to each TV of the show, and to match the colors and greyscales. What stands out about this project is the group work. There were no bad ideas.

What optical metadata did you use?

We weren't so precise that we needed everything all the time, but the simple fact of knowing which focal length was used helped us a lot. We note down everything that's used on set, but this metadata was very useful, particularly for things that need to be frame accurate, like the focus distance. It gave us important information for applying virtual defocus to the CGI while being perfectly in tune with what was happening on the image.