Deep Cuts: From cow-spotting to Covid - how Outpost created News of the World’s Red River

In late 2019, Outpost VFX’s UK team were assigned around 350 shots for the film. But, with Covid-19 uprooting production, many of the plates received by the team were sparsely populated with minimal set design; some of which was filmed in empty parking lots.

For Outpost’s Internal VFX Supervisor Ian Fellows, Client-side VFX Supervisor Roni Rodrigues, and crew, creating an authentic vision of 19th century Texas from scratch would be a huge undertaking. The scope of the project would soon increase, including new aerial footage filmed on an abandoned set, and additional changes made on the fly. Add the UK lockdown, and News of the World would test the team in new ways – Red River most of all.

News of the World was a massive project and Red River was a key sequence of the film. What made that scene so challenging?

I think it was the number of different elements that had to be put into that one shot. Because, when they went up in the helicopter, they'd already finished the shoot. They came back with aerial shots which were completely empty and the whole environment needed to be reimagined.

In the film, the surrounding area is flat, but the real environment had hills and that sort of stuff. Then we needed to fit the river in, so that was a big challenge, too.

It just kind of just kept growing. There was initial talk about whether we’d add aerial photography with people that we could drop in, and then it was determined we wouldn't do that. But it cuts directly into a shot that's populated with cattle and a busy town, so they had to come from somewhere.

So, the focus was digi-doubles and the cattle. We'd created cattle already, but suddenly we needed to deploy thousands, and they had to funnel all the way into the town.

It looks amazing at the end obviously and we’re really happy with it. It’s a big centrepiece but, yeah, it was a daunting one.

You mentioned that the cattle herd grew to thousands. How did you produce the herd quickly, but keep that authenticity?

We created a lot of custom solutions. With the herd, it wasn't a crowd sim, it was a use of a particle system. We were instancing the cows based on particles and used a bunch of animation cycles; walking, trotting, idling, you know.

If you were to sit and look really carefully over a long period of time you would probably see that the animations are very similar, but when you start to direct lots of them together you confuse the eye. But it also meant we had strange things happen. Some cattle would suddenly veer off on a weird tangent or walk through one another. So, we had to have massive ‘cattle spotting sessions’ in the cinema suite, where we’d look out for all the weird ones and remove them. We were finding them right up to the very end.

Have you looked at a herd of cattle the same since? 

Yeah, I can't do it. It's weird, because it had to look realistic, but they were very choreographed. It was quite a challenge. It's deception by numbers.

The lockdown happened during production. How did you handle that?

You know what, I look back and I have no idea how we managed to pull it off.  In the end I think we had 50 per cent of our comp team who remained in the building. Most of the 3D team were out of the building, there were one or two. I remained here all the time because there was just no way of being able to check the material quickly enough remotely. Obviously, things have evolved now. Remote working has become a possibility, but back then it was like balancing cards on a needle. You felt like things were going to topple if you weren't too careful. There were all sorts of ingenious workaround solutions to try and get the work done.

Now it’s delivered, and the film is well received, are you proud of the achievement?

I think everybody that worked on that show knew that it was a quality thing, and I think it was almost like a kind of anchor in the uncertainty of Covid. I think people felt like at least there was a bit of a normality and they’re working on something of good quality that was going to do well. I think that made difference.

There were days when we were just looking at it going, ‘I don't know how our team are managing to produce this stuff’, like, ‘this is coming of our office during a pandemic, it’s amazing’. So, I think we'll always be proud because of that.

It's amazing you were able to iterate so quickly considering the scale of the project 

I think we were lucky to have such an amazing team. And at the time it was the main focus in the Bournemouth studio, so we were able to manoeuvre our way around things. But the team kind of grew into it. They were very much about thinking cleverly to get their way out of things. It was a really solid team that we built for that, yeah.

Are there any scenes that you’re particularly fond of throughout the rest of the film?

There are so many. I think the two scariest things for me at the time were the Red River sequence and the Johanna Calling sequence. We've got the massive river and the full environment, and it was shot in a car park with the blue screen. Because it had to be heavily designed it was a massive rendering challenge.

The other one was San Antonio Square, because again, there weren’t really any concept designs for it, and we just had this strip in a casino parking lot. The end result I think is fantastic, but it was quite an evolution to get to that point because we were almost designing as we went. It’s historical, and it's based in factual reality, but there isn't a lot of material from that time. It’s before there were things like cameras, so it's a lot of inference and research.

I think those are the ones that stand out for me. But there are so many things we did on the show. We created a sandstorm for three shots: a huge simulation. That's the thing, there’s so much thrown at that film for just a few shots. Things that we never even contemplated. A massive particle sandstorm or throwing horses downhill.

See a breakdown of all our work on News of the World below

Ian Fellows has 25 years’ experience in visual effects as a VFX Supervisor and a Lead Compositor, and has been at Outpost VFX for over 4 years. Based in our Bournemouth studio, Ian is VFX Supervisor and Learning & Development Manager at Outpost as well as a Visiting Lecturer for Arts University Bournemouth.

Career highlights include his time as VFX Supervisor on Universal’s News of The World, Sequence Lead on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Lead Compositor on Superman Returns and Lead Compositor on three of the Harry Potter Films.