It’s awards season once again, and we are incredibly proud to see our work represented across the board. Seven Oscar-nominated films feature our work – talk about a stellar lineup! We worked on three out of five nominees for Best Visual Effects – Alien: Romulus, Dune: Part Two, and Wicked. As for films nominated in other categories, we also worked on Gladiator II, Nosferatu, The Substance and The Six Triple Eight, and although they aren’t nominated for VFX, we like to think we provided strong moral support.
In more awards excitement, the Visual Effects Society (VES) awards nominated a grand total of sixteen shows that our teams were involved in. Following the VES ceremony on 11th February 2025, we were very pleased to see five of these projects took home a total of ten awards! These awards are judged by a panel of professionals with long-standing expertise in VFX. We’re especially proud to have provided LiDAR and environment scanning services to all four of the nominations for Outstanding Environment in a Photoreal Feature – Civil War, Wicked, Dune: Part Two, and Gladiator II, with Dune picking up the win. We also provided LiDAR scanning services to Shōgun, which took home the award for Outstanding Environment in an Episode, Commercial, Game Cinematic or Real-time project.
On the character side of things, our team used Dorothy to capture facial performances of Tom Hanks and Robin Wright that helped drive the incredible de-aging in Robert Zemeckis’ Here, winner of the Emerging Technologies Award.
And to top it all off, the team from Dune: Part Two picked up a BAFTA for Special Visual Effects at the ceremony last night in London. Congratulations!
To celebrate, we wanted to share a little more on our work on these projects, to give you an idea of what it’s like in our small but vital cog in the big machine that is an award winning film or TV show.
For Dune: Part Two, the team delivered cast, prop and LiDAR/Environment scanning across the three shoot locations. For the main studio shoot in Budapest, we had London crew travel over to capture full body and prop scans, while our local Hungarian crew captured LiDAR and textures. Then production, along with the full body system, moved first to Jordan and then on to Abu Dhabi for exterior desert scenes. The UK full body crew were joined by London-based environment scanning team, capturing key shoot locations with ground based LiDAR and aerial drone photogrammetry. Over the course of the shoot, we captured 2.3 terabytes of full body data, over 5 terabytes of prop and 4.2 terabytes of LiDAR and Environment data over more than 60 shoot days.
On ‘The Substance’, Dorothy made another star turn (pun intended if you’ve seen the film). With an incredible actor like Demi Moore putting in a performance worthy of an Oscar nomination, the director naturally wanted even the fully CG assets to contain as much of that real performance as possible. First, we shipped a full body scanner out to the studio in Paris to scan Demi and the ‘Monstro Elisasue’ prosthetic suit. Then, once the shoot had wrapped, we captured the “fleshy blob” SFX prop with our prop photogrammetry rig and laser scanner at our Pinewood HQ. Finally, Demi Moore visited our LA office for a Dorothy session, where we captured her facial performance in 4D. We utilised our per-frame map 4D pipeline, which provides a set of texture maps for every single frame of the performance, enabling the VFX vendor to preserve and reproduce fine details in Demi’s performance that would not otherwise be possible. These three captures were then able to serve as a crucial foundation for the VFX team to marry the real footage with the digital assets and achieve the incredible (and shocking) climactic sequence of the film, with this specific approach ensuring that even when the audience was seeing a fully CG asset, it would be driven by a real performance given by the actor herself.
For Wicked, it was all hands on deck as we delivered prop, LiDAR, cast and Dorothy head scans. Parts 1 and 2 were filmed back-to-back in Sky Studios Elstree, which made for a long shoot, especially as the studio was still under contruction for most of it. Luckily we had one of the all-time nicest VFX crews to see us through it, and what a pleasure it was.
From braving massive sandstorms to working from our (slightly) more tranquil offices in London, Atlanta, Budapest, Athens, Cape Town and Culver City, our team can go almost anywhere and capture almost anything, and over the course of these fantastic projects we certainly got to test that out. As we celebrate these nominations and the VES winners, we want to extend our congratulations to all the VFX teams, filmmakers, and crews that brought these projects to life. It was an honour to contribute, and we’re excited for what 2025 will bring! And best of luck to all the Oscars nominees!