The Irregulars is available to watch on Netflix now,
a shadowy adventure about a group of misfits
investigating supernatural crime in Victorian London
on behalf of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.
It's a show that provides an interesting challenge from a VFX perspective.
The team not only has to show an authentic Victorian London
with era-appropriate landmarks to help orientate us,
but also demonstrate a suite of other-worldly special effects
that feel real enough to keep us grounded in the grim reality of the show.
With that in mind, we caught up with Richard Briscoe,
Visual Effects Supervisor from The Irregulars,
to discuss how the world was brought to life
and specifically how the team created the Rip from the season finale.
So, this is where I become a god.
Work on one of the most striking effects in the show
started long before we even see it.
We're talking about the Rip, an interdimensional tear in time and space
from which some of the show's characters draw their power.
It's such a crucial part of the story and world
that the design took over 12 months,
beginning with the preparation for the first episode.
Richard describes the Rip as an aperture to a negative world,
something Watson refers to in the show as purgatory.
My way of conceiving it
is that if you imagine a ragged, torn, half-rotten bit of cloth hanging,
and it's threadbare and there's a hole gaping in the middle of it,
that's the hole we look through
and through that we see endless depths.
But we don't see the cloth.
And, indeed, if we were to go alongside the cloth
and look behind, in our world there's nothing behind it,
it's just a kind of… it's a hole hanging in space.
So, it's a kind of a bit… bit of a contradiction.
In some respects, the team approached the Rip as if it was a character.
It's not sentient as such,
but it was designed with a presence and liveliness to it,
responding to the raised emotions or the threat of Jessie.
It's also something that has to evolve over the course of the show.
When we first see it with Linen Man, it's collapsing and partially defeated.
And when he's drawn away, it becomes more chaotic and unstable.
It almost has an arc or lifespan of its own.
It's negative energy, in the sense that it's evil,
but the team also approached this from a photographic perspective
of inverted colours,
a period-appropriate nod that references
the setting as the dawn of photography.
Because of this, the colour palette presented a challenge.
The team wanted to present the blues, cyans and dark greens
we associate with negative images
while making sure the Rip didn't feel aquatic or electrical.
So, we fell back on…
I suppose, organic references of…
blistering and burning and smouldering and tearing
as a way of expanding,
and we looked at sort of time-lapse photography of mould.
We looked at bubbling mud baths.
We looked at celluloid film blistering.
We looked at all these things to try and give it a somewhat organic,
natural feel rather than a magical feel.
The Rip also presented a challenge
in how actors physically interacted with it.
To create these scenes, the team used witness cameras
to provide a second angle on the action
so they could better judge where everything is.
When Jessie or Sherlock immerse their arms in the Rip, for example,
a witness camera is essential for working out spatial information.
They also used laser lines to accurately plot points of intersection,
and the lines were painted out in post.
As you'd expect, the bigger effects,
such as Alice dissolving and disintegrating,
required a more comprehensive approach.
In this case, it meant the team had to calculate
the approximate three-dimensional geometry for her form.
Utilising the same kind
of particles and textures that we've used inside the Rip,
we start to bring them in and through her as if from within,
so that we can start to actually unravel her or dissolve her, so…
as you watch Alice dissolve,
the bits of her that are still recognisably Alice
are as photographed.
The bits that are the particles and the streams of vapours
are where we've erased the real Alice
and just replaced it with this other material.
So, there you go.
Let us know your favourite moment in The Irregulars.
And remember that if you haven't already seen it,
the whole show is available to watch now on Netflix.