The Oscar-winning VFX supervisor helped plan, design and deliver 500 visual effect shots for the Steve McQueen period drama about a 9-year-old evacuee who tries to journey back home to find his mother, turning back the clock to depict the devastating effects on the city and its people of the Nazi aerial attacks on England.
During World War II, children were evacuated from British cities to the countryside and other countries to escape German aerial bombings. This is the subject of the Apple TV+ production Blitz, now streaming, where a nine-year-old evacuee decides to journey back home to reunite with his mother. To recreate this historical period, filmmaker Steve McQueen relied upon the skills of Production Designer Adam Stockhausen, Costume Designer Jacqueline Durran, and Visual Effects Supervisor Andrew Whitehurst. Both Whitehurst and McQueen share Fine Arts backgrounds, and a love of painting, which influenced their creative collaboration.
“Steve had not previously done a film with significant visual effects,” says Whitehurst. “What I hope I was able to do was talk to him in a more artist-to-artist way rather than making things unnecessarily technical. Most of our initial conversations were creatively driven. Steve is collaborative and wants you to bring ideas. That relationship allowed me to do quick storyboards and say, ‘This is what we had in mind.’ That helped us establish a visual lexicon quickly. My first conversations with Steve were about atmosphere, smoke, sparks in the air, and debris - the sort of textural stuff. This was how I hoped to get him onboard with using visual effects, which can sometimes feel like an alienating discipline for a director.”
While historical authenticity was important, McQueen describes Blitz as a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. According to Whitehurst, “We always started with historical truth and then asked, ‘What do we want the shot to evoke? What are we trying to make the audience feel at this point? How can the way we light it help that? If we add two small bits of fire still burning in one building, what does that do emotionally?’ In the film’s last shot, one destroyed house in the background has a wash line with laundry blowing on it. That may not have happened on that street, but it adds humanity and a connection to something we all understand.”
Establishing shots were entirely CGI to achieve the necessary scope and narrative context. “The wide shots were built from the ground up with a destroyed city in mind,” Whitehurst explains. “The first establishing shots are over the docks in East London. We used accurate pre-war maps to recreate the street and dock layouts. Since the docks were filled in after the war, and houses now sit on them, it wasn’t like we could take a helicopter, film the real locations, and change a few things. It’s a profoundly different place.”
Everything was driven by the desired final cinematic result. “By understanding the intended feeling of the finished shot, you can work backward to build it effectively without wasting time on unnecessary details,” Whitehurst observes. “We don’t have the time or budget to build every nut and bolt of East London just to cover it with smoke. I feel horrible anytime something is built that doesn’t end up on screen.”
Street-level destruction was shown in firefighting scenes. “We LiDAR-scanned set builds and photographed period-appropriate buildings to create digital variations of the practical sets,” says Whitehurst. “[Special Effects Supervisor] Hayley Williams’ team provided real flames for reference in our effects simulations. The only additions without special effects reference were big background smoke columns drifting across the city, for which we used newsreel footage as inspiration.”
A bombing at London’s Café de Paris required an elaborate set build focused on the ground floor. “There’s a wide shot looking down through tall awnings into the bombed-out café - that’s a matte painting I created over the photography,” says Whitehurst. “At ground level, most effects were practical, in-camera with some paint out. But we digitally removed the odd blink here and there from actors portraying the dead. When people are pulling earrings off them, it’s a big ask not to react.”
People fleeing the bombing often found refuge in the subway tunnels. One tunnel flooding scene was done mostly practical. “The production wanted to do as much of the flood practically as possible, so a couple of decommissioned Tube stations in London often used [in productions] wasn’t possible,” says Whitehurst. “Hayley’s team built two two-ton dump tanks to release water through the Tube station set’s roof. High-volume pumps circulated the warm water through the set. Everything was done practically. Stunt performers were pulled by cables to help sell the strong currents, but child actors only waded through waist-high water, with torrential effects added later using plates and some CG water to tie everything together.”
The film features 500 visual effects shots, evenly split between Cinesite and Raynault VFX, with ILM stepping in at the end to fill editorial gaps. “Post-production took about a year,” notes Whitehurst. “Each VFX house was assigned distinct assets so they could build them in their own way and avoid the need to share.”
Nine-year-old Elliott Hefferman made his cinematic debut as the lead. “Elliott was a total pro,” says Whitehurst. “He’s an old soul in a young body. He reacted to practical sets and locations with ease. If we said, ‘It will feel like a stronger current later,’ he understood. Elliott was fantastic.”
Whitehurst’s design process was often ad hoc. “I like to take screengrabs from the Avid and paint over them in Procreate or Photoshop,” he explains. “I did a bunch of scenes where Steve would say, ‘I’m not sure why this concept isn’t quite working. What can we do?’ Once we were feeling good and aligned on a vision, I’d share them with VFX houses and say, ‘This is the work in progress shot that I painted over the top. I added smoke here.’ It gave them a clear direction for the next iteration.”
“I did storyboards in sketchbooks, which I show to Steve and asked, ‘Is this what you want?’” he adds. “Then I would take a picture of it, send it to ILM and say, ‘That’s the framing.’”
Principal photography occurred across London and in big, elaborate set builds with greenscreens used for digital extensions. “St. Paul’s Cathedral had been sandblasted clean in the 1980s, but in 1940 it was filthy from industrial smoke and smog rather than from bomb damage,” says Whitehurst. “We had to dirty up nice, clean stone fronted buildings to be period correct, adjust street signage, and remove modern elements like skylights and ringing video doorbells. Most of the vehicles were practical; there was a good number of period cars and trucks kept in good condition, as well as buses. There are a couple CG buses. All the stores needed fixing. A lot of that was done by the art department, but for shots out of a moving bus, visual effect sorted that all out.”
Even the smaller street scenes required augmentation. “Most people living in London who want more housing space have extended up into their loft, so they’ve got skylights in their roofs,” he adds. “There was a lot of work to make a real Victorian street look like an actual 1940 Victorian street.”
Digital doubles were sparingly used. “We shot some old-school sprite crowds for backgrounds,” says Whitehurst. “For instance, George jumping off a train was filmed in a backlot with a stunt performer, onto a greenscreen with a wind machine. For the wide shot, the distance was long enough that there was no need for a face replacement, due to the aesthetic style of the camera work. We didn’t need any digital doubles.”
The vista shots were the hardest because there was nowhere to hide. “They’re long shots so you spend plenty of time looking at them,” Whitehurst notes. “The rest of the work was difficult because effects simulations are hard, and building environments or set extensions with the fidelity of the needed texture is tricky. Lighting them appropriately is difficult as well. Blitz was shot with Panavision C Series lenses which are beautiful but give compositors a harder time than modern glass. Nothing was a surprise in terms of what I thought would be easy but turned out not to be, or vice versa. Surprises came in realizing places where we needed additional shots, which is where ILM stepped in. The did five extra fully CG shots.”
Whitehurst, who has lived in London for quite some time, is familiar with much of what happened in the city during World War II. Recreating that period of history was emotionally affecting. “The Tube flooding happened in Balham, which is an area of London about a mile and a half from where I’m talking to you now,” he remarks. “I knew about that because it’s a noted piece of local history. When you walk around the city, you’re aware of the history of the bomb damage because buildings still have shrapnel marks, or destroyed buildings have been replaced with something modern. The thing that was most surprising was how emotionally affecting confronting this became.”
“We did some additional photography when George runs down a real street in Stepney, and from a crane up in the rooftops, you can see bomb-damaged Victorian terraces and where they’d been repaired with cement, alongside apartment blocks built in the 1950s when funds became available to rebuild,” Whitehurst reflects. “Digitally restoring the damage to the houses and imagining the belongings of the people who lived there was profoundly moving. It made the history feel viscerally real.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
