After eight years, five seasons and a concluding feature film, VFX supervisor Richard Frazer laughs at the notion he’s earned a PhD in 10th century British history; as the sole visual effects vendor for the entire run, BlueBolt handled historically accurate CG characters, massive armies, and gory combat on the Netflix series and feature.
After spending eight years and five seasons, first as a digital compositor for BlueBolt, then as the production visual effects supervisor, on the hit Netflix historical drama series The Last Kingdom, Richard Frazer laughs when it’s suggested he now has a PhD in 10th century British history. “Let’s say, ‘yes’! I loved working on the show and was only supervising from Season 3 onwards. It’s an embarrassment to say I haven’t learnt as much as I should. There are a couple artists on The Last Kingdom who are historical buffs and definitely have a lot of input into the authenticity. Our head of matte painting at BlueBolt, Tamara Toppler, is so into that whole era and takes part in Viking camps. We start with authenticity and go, ‘Lets have some creative license on this.’ Because in the end we’re still making a piece of entertainment.”
In the Netflix film, The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die, which is based on the series, the overall visual aesthetic remains dark and desaturated. “It’s slightly disheartening when you worry about all of this stuff that gets lost in the DI,” admits Frazer. “But when you actually step back and watch the finished product you go, ‘Okay, it fits the mood of the show.’” The style of buildings, vehicles and clothing from the era were well-established beforehand in the series. But, according to Frazer, “The addition of the new armies from the northern islands meant asking our historical consultant how their visual aesthetic would differ from the southern mainland. Apparently, the style of ship building, clothing, and weaponry was generic across Britain at the time, but the clients wanted each army to be visually unique so that they could be identified in a battlefield.”
BlueBolt was the sole visual effects vendor for entire run of The Last Kingdom. “Probably the biggest change has been in how we approach the crowd extensions for the massive battles that The Last Kingdom is known for,” notes Frazer. “Back in the early seasons we relied more on a 2D approach, i.e., shooting repeated plate passes of our real crowd actors and stitching them together in comp to multiply the numbers. We would use fully CG characters sparingly and they would always be hidden away behind real actors in the foreground. As our CG assets improved, we were more confident putting them front and center in frame, to where we could just have full CG characters standing full frame next to our real actors and you would not tell the difference.”
As for the workflow, little changed going from series to feature film. “The main difference was the wider aspect ratio, use of anamorphic lenses and a 4K delivery format,” observes Frazer. “But apart from this more cinematic look, it was familiar territory for the majority of the visual effects.” That meant assets were leveraged from the previous seasons. “Thankfully the major armies of the show [Mercians, Danes, Wessex] were assets that we had reused over the seasons, allowing us to iteratively improve their quality each time,” Frazer shares. “We had soldiers from many other armies now involved [Scottish, Welsh and various British islands] that we had to create from scratch, but we leveraged what we had learned for the previous army builds.”
Also making the shift from episodic to feature is filmmaker Ed Bazalgette. “We had worked with Ed previously as he had directed six episodes of the series, the majority of which had significant battles in them,” Frazer notes. “So, he was already familiar with the material, knows how to direct action sequences, and we have an established rapport with him. Ed knows me and BlueBolt well, as I’ve previously been out supervising onset with him and he has attended many visual effects review sessions in our screening room, so it really helps having that established relationship with the director.” Bazalgette is a fan of storyboarding for action sequences. “The sheer scale of the battle in Seven Kings Must Die meant that he didn’t storyboard every shot, but we had all the key shots and plot beats drawn out ahead of the shoot. Previs was not relevant to this show, but we did some rough postvis for the wide battle shots, as they were just plates of an empty battlefield that we populated with fully CG armies.”
Principal photography lasted from January to March 2022 in Hungary. “There is an amazing, purpose-built set at a studio in Hungary where all of the main The Last Kingdom cities and story locations are shot,” Frazer explains. “They are all sandwiched together, so if you ever come up for a wide shot you might see, for example, Winchester in the back of a shot of Aegelsburg. We have an established workflow of extending the cites to make them look unique and within a wider landscape. You’re always trying to find the sweet spot of building enough of a set that allows you to shoot scenes without the help of visual effects set extensions but weighing up the cost of constructing a mediaeval city.”
The wooden fortress Bebbanburg, situated on top of a sea cliff in Northumbria, was a difficult environment to construct. “There was a set built for the interior courtyard, and another separate set for the exterior gates and a small amount of the palisade walls, but these are just in a field in the Hungarian countryside,” Frazer says. “We have always had to use visual effects to extend the size of the fortress and make it appear to be on a cliff edge, as well as linking the interior and exterior sets together.”
“BlueBolt delivered 375 shots by November of 2022,” remarks Frazer. “By comparison, we delivered 769 shots for 10 episodes of Season 5.” A modified pipeline was utilized for the project. “We had just moved our internal pipeline over to using Shotgrid Toolkit, and Seven Kings Must Die was the first show in which we had tested it out,” he adds. “There was some getting used to the new workflow and plenty of bug fixing. But aside from that, we used our usual suite of software: Nuke, Maya and Golaem for crowd simulation.”
A last-minute decision escalated the visual effects and scope for the Valhalla sequence.
Noting that the dining hall was always scripted as a mirror image of the main hall in Bebbanburg, done to deliberately confuse audiences whether or not it was real or an illusion, Frazer says, “In the edit it was decided that it needed to be something much grander, so we designed an extended version of the dining hall that scaled off into an infinite size that was way beyond what you could see in camera. This then had to be populated with hundreds of drunken, banqueting Vikings, so we had to motion capture a vast library of actions of the greatest party of the afterlife!”
“When we were doing motion capture for The Last Kingdom, we bought some mocap suits so we could capture stuff in the office and because we needed to have the weight something in your hands to affect the performance, we had a shield and baseball bat,” reveals Frazer. “We really pushed Golaem [crowd simulation software] to its limits for the final battle scenes. The armies were crushed together in a giant shield wall and slowly pushing each other around. We had close quarter fighting, lots of soldiers just being crushed together and a ‘swine wedge’ battering ram trying to break through. Crowd simulation software doesn’t tend to cope well with characters being so close that they intersect each other, and the dynamics of a character’s movement rippling through all the characters around it. Our crowd team did a great job of using the simulations to get us to a certain level and then just hand adjusting and culling characters as needed.”
There can be no warfare without blood and gore. “The show has always been really fun for the amount of blood that the clients want to see in the visual effects,” observes Frazer. “The client note of ‘more blood’ has become so common it’s kind of the unofficial motto for the show [and is frequently on our crew T-shirts]. We have built up a huge library of blood elements over the seasons, as it’s by far the most common type of visual effects shot that we do. I think some of our artists get through around 40 or 50 blood shots each per season. We have even more fun doing our featured ‘hero’ deaths, where we shoot bespoke elements to really enhance the gore. I always push to shoot practical elements and use them as a basis for compositing, rather than relying on CG simulations for this sort of thing.”
Reimaging Valhalla proved to be the most complex shot. “It was not just about the shots themselves being quite technically complex, but just getting the tone of the scene right,” states Frazer. “We needed to find the right balance of it not looking too fantastical/magical [and bumping with the established aesthetic of the show] and this being the big emotional climax of the series. Hopefully the fans will find it a satisfying conclusion to the story that we’ve all enjoyed working on for the last eight years.”
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.
