Outsider directors Dom & Nic: “After researching the feasibility of shooting a real black swan it became clear the best way forward for this film was to create it entirely in CG [but] we wanted to approach it with the same mentality and process that we would do a live action shoot.

“It was really important for us to have the freedom to edit rushes and not start building the film from rigidly timed storyboards. MPC developed the spot and deployed the skills of a DOP to conform the camera direction and lighting to real-life filming language.

MPC VFX Supervisor Jim Radford: “This project was nothing short of epic in scale from a CG perspective – we were creating a hyper-real scenario using a practical filmmaking paradigm.

“Every decision was made as if we were actually in the space filming – each shot imagined through a real lens and on a real shooting platform with cranes, dollys and sticks all established ahead of time.

“As with the camera direction, the lighting was aligned to a practical film-making paradigm. Together with DOP Alex Barber, the team designed a practical lighting setup using dimmable strips of lights as part of the environment design.

“These, along with lights behind the fan turbine, formed the setup used to light all of the shots. All lights were balanced on a per-shot basis, and smaller lights were added to hero-light the swan.”

Agency: VCCP
Agency Producer: Ellie Gibb
Creative Director: Colin Byrne
Creatives: Josh Dando & Steven Dodd

Production Company: Outsider
Directors: Dom & Nic
Production Company Producer: John Madsen
DoP: Alex Barber

VFX: MPC
VFX Producer: Dionne Archibald
VFX Supervisor: Jim Radford
CG Supervisor: Amir Bazazi
2D Supervisor: Rod Norman
VFX Team: Andreu Lucio Archs, Arttu Koskela, Diarmid Harrison-Murray, Jessie Amadio, Kiril Mirkov, Luca Maccarelli, Michael Diprose, Tim Van Hussen, Tito Fernandes, Ingo Putze, Priya Bandodkar, Pritesh Krishnappa Kotian, Manjunath Ramakrishnaiah, Amber Frisenda, Garth Reilly & Alexander Kulikov
Colorist: Jean-Clément Soret

Editor: Ed Cheesman @ Final Cut