Belgravia
BlueBolt was the primary VFX studio on Belgravia - Julian Fellow’s popular drama series exploring the secrets and dishonour amongst the upper echelon of London society on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Starring Tamsin Greig and Harriet Walter.
BlueBolt were tasked with replicating Belgravia of the 1800s, referencing the works of master builder Thomas Cubitt alongside shot reference photography of contemporary Belgravia in London. The location for the Belgravia shots was the beautifully preserved Moray Place in Edinburgh, featuring the classic dark stone buildings. The VFX transformation from dark Edinburgh stone to white Belgravia stucco, started with a lidar scan to create a Moray Place model to allow us to remodel and replace the stone work with Belgravia CG buildings.
We wanted to retain as much as possible from the Edinburgh location - trees, pavements, window reflections, doors and railings - and therefore decided not to use greenscreen and instead use a lot of rotoscoping and compositing tricks to combine this with our CG Belgravia.
We were tasked with creating four aerial shots of Belgravia and Eaton Square Gardens. Using plates shot from a helicopter of present day Belgravia as a base, the team researched maps from the 1840s when the area was still under construction and at the edge of an urban area. Buckingham Palace had to be stripped back to an older layout and building sites were added to tell the story that the building of the whole area was ongoing.
A significant CG build, combined with matte painting, was required to create the Belgravia of the time and surrounding London. The aerial shots were brought to life with CG crowd and carriages, as well as a great deal of rotoscoping, clean up and compositing. In the end, a few key features like St Peter’s Church and some of the gardens were the only items untouched in terms of the period re-working.
The finale takes place on the banks of the Thames in a seedy part of East London. This was filmed at Chatham Docks, although completely on dry land with a greenscreen where the Thames would be. A CG environment was created for the south bank of the Thames along with a CG river populated by numerous CG ships.