TPO’s Matt Tinsley and Ed Plant were part of a wider team of senior compositors who had joined forces, during the winter 2020/21 lockdown, to become the sole VFX vendor on Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. The set for Belfast was a single terraced street, eight houses long, built on hard standing adjacent to Farnborough Airport. Covid restrictions made filming on a street in Belfast impossible, so VFX transformed that small on-set street into the dark and claustrophobic atmosphere that was Belfast in 1969.

During filming the set was re-dressed, shop fronts were changed and houses repainted so it could serve as a variety of different streets within Belfast. Each set change gave the VFX team the opportunity to add additional shop fronts, set extensions and background environments to help with the illusion of a different location, also adding threatening clouds, lights, smoke, birds or helicopters to mask the clear skies on the day of the summer shoot.

Another location was Buddy’s school which had to double up as the hospital. For this, director Kenneth Brannagh asked VFX to relocate the hospital to the coast, completing its transformation. 

In the shot of the bus returning Buddy from the theatre trip, VFX created a completely new view across the end of our street adjusting the set and adding in the backdrop of the city. This shot epitomised many of the shots created for Belfast.  

Belfast is such a personal film that the production team resisted using an outside VFX facility. Instead, they chose to hire compositors directly, which allowed complete control and flexibility as the movie developed.

There were over 200 VFX shots created for Belfast. They were subtle and hopefully unnoticeable but complemented the movie’s atmosphere from those troubled times.

Words adapted from the VES award submission for outstanding supporting visual effects in a photoreal feature.