Bridgerton s4

Project Overview

Outpost VFX returned to Bridgerton for its fourth season as lead vendor, delivering 300 shots ranging from full-CG environment establishers to creature work and invisible FX.

The project was led internally by VFX Supervisor John McLaren, who also served as overall VFX lead for the series including the shoot. Previous seasons relied heavily on on-location shoots in areas with well-preserved Regency buildings such as Bath. This time around, however, the production set up shop at Shepperton Studios on a purpose-built Bridgerton set.

“The set at the Shepperton backlot includes a rebuild of the Royal Crescent in Bath, three streets with regency buildings, a marketplace and a town hall,” begins McLaren. “The streets were constructed as residential zones, shopping areas and a Spitalfields-themed road.

“We were tasked with creating set extensions to top up the practical build on the backlot, creating a top floor and roof. The backlot is designed to be a contained area with the streets and marketplace enclosed by a perimeter of houses. Along this perimeter are four arched entrance and exit points, we were tasked to extend the environment outside the archways.”

McLaren, alongside contributions from additional on-set VFX Supervisors Roni Rodrigues and Jason Evans, has been entrenched with the Bridgerton crew since the spinoff series, Queen Charlotte.

“If you include Queen Charlotte, we’ve been on set for three seasons,” says McLaren. “A lot of our VFX requests and requirements for some locations are quite standardised now, so client-side production and art dept know what we need when it comes to shooting.

“The Bridgerton world has a well-established look so from the start of shot work the VFX team don’t have to reinvent the look – all of the work during pre-production and our work on previous season means we are very integrated into the Bridgerton universe.”

As in season 3, the most recent block of episodes featured a significant amount of full-CG establishers in addition to the extensions of the Shepperton set.

“Each season we try to push the detail of the CG establishers,” highlights McLaren.

“In most cases we always start with actual London street layouts, we then adjust them to match any references of those streets from the early 1800s.”

“This season we wanted to introduce more variation in the road layouts so recreated more streets with curves, dead ends, and height variations. Mikael Pettersen, CG Supervisor, wrote a number of Houdini tools to procedurally introduce these variations.

“The timelapse establisher was quite a challenge. It had to work to specific beats in the story, so we worked with the client-side editorial team to create a previz which was based on reference. This provided us with timings for sunrise, sunset, and shadow and cloud movement we needed.”

Additional work included a CG butterfly much like those seen at the end of the third season, as well as a host of invisible effects throughout each episode.

“A number of scenes were shot during the summer, and the story required them to be to appear autumnal. We used a combination of DMP matte painting, reconstructing autumnal versions of foliage in speed tree, procedural leave scatters, and grading solutions in comp to create these invisible seasonal changes,” explains McLaren.

“In episode four, we had to create an invisible transition between two separate locations to create one seamless camera move, to give the impression that Bridgerton House and its neighbouring house were on the same street.

“This involved various techniques, retiming camera, reprojecting parts of the environment, additional CG foliage as well as all our usually cg work we do on the front of Bridgerton house, all this contributes to convince these two different locations exits on the same street.”

Bridgerton season 4 is available to watch now, only on Netflix.