Framestore Reunites with Matthew Vaughn for Action-packed WW1 Film The King’s Man

Matthew Vaughn's WWI-based prequel to the hugely popular Kingsman films, The King’s Man, gives us the long-awaited origin story of the intelligence agency. Framestore’s contribution was led by Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Chris Lawrence, who previously worked with the filmmakers on Kingsman: The Golden Circle. The team was proud to bring note-perfect VFX to the action-packed spy flick, which stars Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton and Harris Dickinson.

The Kingsman films are renowned for their distinct over-the-top action sequences and comic timing, and this was no exception. During the shoot there was a drive to film as practically as possible, capturing the action in-camera with the use of blue and green screens. “It was very stunt-led,” explains Chris, who was on set for the UK-based shoot. “Stunt Director Brad Allen, who trained with Jackie Chan, opted for a physical production strategy with minimal sets, with the knowledge that they'd be augmented with VFX.” This is where Framestore came in.

Celebrated for creating seamless invisible environments, Framestore received reference material from the shoot to help them create digital worlds in which the filmmakers could base their action. A helicopter array shoot in the French Alps provided the artists with a huge amount of photogrammetry to use when building the Baltic mountain landscape in flawless CG, while also adding their own creative flair. One example, the ‘Lair of the Flock’ environment, was loosely based on a particular mountain, but for the sake of the story the team needed to make it look more imposing against its backdrop as well as adding snow - a lot of snow - to it. “It’s a complete digital environment and was quite an undertaking,” says Lawrence. “It was about 1km high and some of the time it had to be seen less than a millimetre, a pixel, away which was a challenge for our asset builders.”

The Kingsman films are full of unforgettable characters, and when the team learned that the story required goats who needed to be directed and interact with the cast, they realised they’d have to be built digitally. VFX supervisor Chris Eckardt, from Framestore’s LA studio, put together a small production team to capture footage of a Markhor goat with an Alexa camera at LA Zoo. The team used footage of the goat in the enclosure to animate on top of, then create a rendered version of the animal. “We wanted to make them look completely photoreal,” says Chris. “When we showed that to Matthew Vaughn and said ‘hey look, that’s our goat!’ and he said ‘What goat?’ they then had total trust in us.”

A close up of the main character, the Duke of Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) as he spins around in the air, struggling to get a grip of his parachute, required a digi double to seamlessly blend with the live-action footage of Fiennes. A shoot using 4D Max’s full body capture technology, mixed with a motion capture session, gave the animators a good base to work from before animating the eyes and mouth to match Fiennes’ original performance. “Apparently they showed Ralph the finished shot and he said that he couldn’t remember having shot it!” adds Chris. “That was a huge compliment.”

A team of over 250 Framestore artists delivered 349 shots for The King’s Man, which was released globally from 22nd December 2021.