Based on the best-selling book by Sarah Pinborough, Behind Her Eyes tells the story of a single mother whose world is thrown upside down when she begins an affair with her new boss. The show was directed by Erik Richter Strand and shot in Scotland, Bristol and London. Goodbye Kansas Studios, which has offices in Stockholm, Hamburg, London and Los Angeles, contributed more than 260 VFX shots and 13 assets, working across all six episodes as the primary vendor. The team was led by Goodbye Kansas Studios’ VFX supervisor Jason M. Halverson, who is based out of the company’s London studio.

Jason M. Halverson

Dreams and Souls
One of the most important aspects of the show are the dream sequences that the characters’ experience in order to travel as astral projections. This interesting quirk of the story was one of the most challenging aspects of the work. It involved creating astral projection scenes showing the characters’ souls leaving their bodies. For the effects team, the most important element of these projections was that they look to integrate believably with the surrounding environment. The team and the series director reviewed reference images of the northern lights and other similar effects from shows gone by to help inform the final look of these lights.

Artists at Goodbye Kansas then depicted the souls as patterns of glowing light, employing a pioneering “2.5D” approach using the Nuke Point Render, a Blink-powered engine for Nuke that’s designed to create, modulate and render dense energy effects. “Blink Script has been available in Nuke for more than five years now, but it’s only come to light in the last year or so just how powerful this technology can be. We were able to harness this power to create elements that previously would have required the FX department. This allowed us to iterate faster for our client to see multiple varied looks with each review,” explains Halverson.

To complete this effect, puppeteers were brought onto set, equipped with poles emitting light from large spheres casting real light. Halverson’s team at Goodbye Kansas then removed the puppeteers but left the light they produced to create the impression that the souls were there, but not there.

“I worked very closely with the puppeteers to make sure they were in the right positions — to keep their bodies and equipment as much out of shot as possible, to come in from the top of the shot as much as possible — so we didn’t have to repair as much on the ground. It’s easier to replace ceilings and skies than it is to replace everything else,” explains Halverson.

Another key element of the work provided by Goodbye Kansas was the characters’ dream sequences. In order for the characters to become astral projections, they would first enter and learn to control a lucid dream state. “The dream sequences were probably the least defined in terms of what we were going to do going into the project, and they were defined only as we shot it and as we got into post production,” says Halverson. “In the end, we did several things, like extending a zombie nightmare sequence off into infinity, creating an idyllic sunny background — like a day at a picnic — and also the door in the woods, which is key to the plot.” The team also generated a sixth digit for the characters in these dream sequences, as a key element of the plot is that they can tell when they’re dreaming by looking at their hands.

The House
The project also included CG set extensions and digital environments, including various smoke, fire and invisible effects. The first piece of work by Goodbye Kansas for the production included a large set extension for Fairdale, a house that plays a central role in the story. Rather than build a physical set, one side of the historic Ardkinglas House, situated on Loch Fyne, was covered in bluescreens and then filmed. The bluescreens were then replaced with a computer-generated wing, which was made to look badly fire-damaged, with details including a collapsed roof, charred edges, water stains and lots of piled-up furniture inside the windows.

The team was also very aware of the fact that the CG wing of the house, even though it was burned, should look exactly like the rest of the house — have the same scale and materials and look as if it was built at the same time. “We had to make sure that you would absolutely believe that our extension was part of the same house. So we had to work very hard to ensure the textures matched, that we had the same amount of lighting and that any weathered spots on the house matched up. Some corners of the house were clearly more battered by the wind, so we had to map those types of corners on our house,” says Halverson. “It really had to have the photorealism to it because you could literally compare our CG set extension to the real house, which was right next to it.”

The Well
Another pivotal scene that involved VFX work was the creation of a set extension depicting a deep well that was to be connected by two shooting locations. This shot used real footage of a prop well, about a meter tall so that the characters could be filmed looking down into it. An additional set was built in a separate studio to depict the bottom of the well. It was designed so the team could place the body of a character who had fallen and allow that character to look up.

“And then we had to integrate these two different sets on both ends. There were no motion-control cameras, so we had to do a lot of reprojection and recreation of the practical well pieces. Then we had to place the body at the bottom and make sure that they were all linked up. This way the camera was able to move up and down the well. We had to make it look like we are actually in a real well. It had to be seamless, and that was really fun,” he says.

The plate for the well. The composite is our main image.

Part of the challenge involved making these prop wells look realistic so that they could merge flawlessly with the surrounding environment. “It can be challenging to get rock texture that looks believable in CG. It takes time to get the aging of the stones, dust, calcium buildup and water trickling down into the well to look right,” says VFX producer Paula Pope. “We also created moss buildup and roots that help make it look as physical as possible.”

Alongside Nuke and Maya, the studio used Point Render software for the R&D of the shimmers, and the team also experimented with adding Optical Flares for Nuke from Video Copilot. They called on V-Ray for rendering and worked on a mix of HP and Dell computers equipped with Nvidia Quadro graphics cards. For their storage needs, they used Pixit Media’s PixStor.