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October 2017

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www.postmagazine.com 4 POST OCTOBER 2017 London-based Framestore recently completed 438 visual effects shots, across 16 sequences, for Matthew Vaughn's sequel to his 2014 hit film, Kingsman: Secret Service, in Kingsman: The Golden Circle. The 20 th Century Fox film, which is currently in theaters, sees stars Taron Egerton and Colin Firth welcome franchise new- comers Channing Tatum, Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore. Here, the story picks up with the Kingsman headquar- ters destroyed and the world being held hostage. The Kingsman discover an allied spy organization in the US who they team up with to defeat a common enemy. Framestore's Oscar-winning VFX su- pervisor Chris Lawrence lead the team to deliver a package of stunning VFX work for this sequel, bringing ever more outlandish action and intrigue to the spy flick. Lawrence was also on-hand during the largely UK shoot, with a base at Leavesden and units at Longcross, Pinewood and Shepperton studios. Here, Lawrence speaks exclusively with Post about the work he and his team completed for the film. The sequel looks really interesting — lots of visual effects. Can you give me an overview of the types of effects Framestore completed for the film? "We covered work across the Alpine building shootout, with full environment builds, the full CG underwater taxi se- quence and a number of other diverse scenes; including the taxi chase you can see in the trailer. Every shot was a different piece, problem and solution which forced us to look at it with new eyes; but this of course, made it a great show to work on." Can you go into some detail about several of the key VFX sequences? "The opening sequence taxi chase was a fun scene to be involved in. Three Jaguars are chasing Eggsy's (Taron Egerton) black cab in a full-on action scene. Stunt supervisor and second unit director Brad Allen was tasked with working through the action beats. He's an amazing guy who trained under Jackie Chan, he had a great approach to storytelling through stunts. He would do 20 takes of a stunt, and if it didn't capture the story beat that he needed, he'd do 20 more until he got it right. "An Array rig setup was mounted on the taxi, which we stitched together to create a 360-degree background which we could then repurpose as a backplate for shots. We had seams between the cameras, and perspective-wise there were issues.These included car tires not sticking to the road, or the car looking too small in shots. We also had to ingest this into our pipeline, which was a chal- lenge. We were then tasked with two major CG environments builds: Waterloo Place and Hyde Park Corner, lit for a nighttime chase scene. Whole London streets were painstakingly recreated in CG for the sequences, based on photo- grammetry and a LIDAR survey of the environments during the day. "There was then the underwater swan station sequence, where Eggsy FRAMESTORE COMPLETES VFX PACKAGE FOR KINGSMAN SEQUEL Framestore created 438 VFX shots for Kingsman: The Golden Circle. By Linda Romanello Chris Lawrence

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