PRODUCTION
want to take anybody out of the scene to say, "Oh, that looks like a visual effect." It should always feel very natural and like it was captured that way. I think that's always the biggest challenge.
You have another big international success like Vikings, which is the Handmaid’s Tale; it’s a completely different production. What are the differences between them? With Vikings, you know that visual effects play a big role with large battle scenes, or a big storm sequence. The audience is aware that when we take someone’s head off, VFX helped make it happen. With a show like The Handmaid's Tale it's more about the hidden. The viewer never feels that VFX is involved in creating a scene or a location. In season 3 of Handmaid’s, there was a big scene that took place at the Lincoln Memorial / Washington monument. Shooting on location in Washington was a big challenge because we couldn't close that area off to the crowds walking around. We tried to have as much crowd control as we could, but without closing the area off entirely, we knew we’d need VFX to make the scene work as the producers wanted it to look. This required a lot of work form Mavericks our VFX vendor, which included rotoscoping, painting out unwanted people, 3D extensions, cleaning up the environment and adding and duplicating the handmaids. As an audience member it looks like we went to Washington shot out scene and captured everything in camera.
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