'MA' /VFX Breakdown Reel/VFX Legion

VFX Legion recently wrapped work on ‘MA,’ Blumhouse Productions’ new psychological horror film, which opened in theaters on May 31st. The award-winning studio tapped its the company’s experience digitally mutilating and eviscerating characters and augmenting practical footage with a range of photorealist visual effects that heightened the visceral impact of some of the movie’s most gruesome and suspenseful scenes.

Horror films are Legion’s wheelhouse. The LA/ B.C.-based company has created visual effects for a long roster of movies in this genre, including several Blumhouse films, such as ‘Sinister 2,’ ‘Insidious: Chapter 3,’ ‘Ouija,’ ‘Amityville:The Awakening' and two films from the ‘Purge’ franchise.

Visual effects were relied on throughout the entire final scene of the movie, which shows the house catching fire and the blaze growing, ultimately consuming the structure. Legion’s team of artists created CG flames with the scale and ferocity to envelopes the house, layering in smoke, particles, and burning embers into add texture and depth.

“The final scene presented the biggest creative and technical challenges,” says VFX Legion Creative Director, James David Hattin. “It closes the movie with a sweeping aerial shot shot from a drone that begins at a distance and passes over the house revealing a 360 view of it engulfed in flames. A late addition to the production, the shot was included to ensure that the climactic ending left the audience with no doubt as to the fate of anyone still inside.”

The original camera move wasn’t stable, so Legion was tasked with digitally recreate director Tate Taylor’s vision of the movie’s final moments. Crafting a CG sequence with this panoramic aerial view required a model of the house to be built from scratch, and then enveloped in a computer-generated inferno.

“Our team wasn’t on-set during the shoot, so we didn’t have a scan of the house or detailed specs to work from,” adds Hattin. “This presented the kind of challenge that makes Legion’s remote pipeline invaluable. Tapping our ability to work as a single unit with the company's global collective of talent, we reached out to our master model builder and CG Artist, London-based Mark Hennessy-Barrett.”

Working on a tight schedule with only a plate photo taken by the drone, and eye-level footage from the movie as visual references, Mark built a ‘destructible,’ detailed replica of the house from the ground up. Once Hennessy-Barrett completed the model, Legion was able to begin work on the dynamics. Artists simulated raging flames coming out of every window on each floor, scorching and incinerating the exterior of the structure, and CG smoke, along with smoldering embers, and falling debris. The final shot recreated the sweeping camera move, climatically ending the film with a single overhead view of Ma's house of horrors consumed in flames.