Trevor Hogg learns how Milk VFX assisted a group of escaped convicts in the Sky series Intergalactic…

Images courtesy of Milk VFX

A jailbreak takes place onboard a prisoner transport ship known as the Hemlock, which leads to a series of adventures ranging from a crash landing on a planet that gets ravaged by a massive dust storm, to visiting a submerged world populated with destroyed rollercoasters. Intergalactic consists of eight episodes overseen by showrunner Julie Gearey (Cuffs) that required 850 visual effects shots provided by Milk VFX, which in turn received additional support from Egg VFX.

There was not much of an opportunity for production VFX supervisor Jean-Claude Deguara (Good Omens) to reuse assets as environments were not revisited, except for scenes involving futuristic London. “This happens a 100 years into the future,” explains Deguara. “We have done a few projects in the past where we needed London so we managed to get a full layout of the city. Afterwards we spoke with director Kieron Hawkes [Fortitude] and discussed how many shots and how much we should do to make this an epic sequence; he went off with a storyboard artist, planned a whole sequence of shots and came back to us. We could constantly keep adding and building up the areas that needed it the most within the real-world space.”

A new layout tool was developed to make creating and rendering London more manageable

Famous landmarks were incorporated into the layout of Old London, such as the Tower Bridge

New London has been built on top of Old London, which has been decimated by a flood. “We looked at massive caves to give us an idea of how light would behave on such a massive scale,” notes Matias Derkacz, head of 2D and onset VFX supervisor. “There is no actual reference of a covered city that we could say, ‘We need to match to this.’”