The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme is a dark comedy espionage film featuring an ensemble cast that includes Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Mathieu Amalric, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, F. Murray Abraham, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Murray.

Cadence Effects provided visual effects on 200 shots for Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. Our work consists of retimes, set extensions, split screens, crew/set clean up, fluid morphs, adding haze/atmosphere, and more.

OUTER BANKS: SEASON 4

Outer Banks is Netflix’s hit mystery teen drama. It follows a group of teens hunting treasure while conquering love, money conflicts, danger, and developing friendships.

And we’re back for season 4! Cadence Effects provided visual effects for season 4 of Outer Banks, tackling more than 780 shots. Our work consisted of blue screen replacements, CG elements, photo replacements, crew/equipment removals, fog additions, land paint outs, stunt and mic wire removals, enhanced the light beam on the lighthouse, added lightning, cell phone comps, and more.

Much like the show, working on Outer Banks is always an adventure! Here’s a deeper look into season 4 episode 2:

“For the night sequence in episode 2, we had the challenge of converting scenes shot in the middle of daylight into the dead of night. Adding to the difficulty was the extreme brightness of the sky and water due to direct sunlight and reflections, which made it difficult to recover the edges of many details on actors and the boat, particularly for parts of shots that were out of focus. The trick with bringing this extreme background brightness down was to try and retain as much brightness and natural lighting on the actors and foreground as possible. In some cases, the background brightness was brought down by a factor of 50! We found that bringing things down in several separate steps yielded the best results, giving us more control over which parts of the shot would receive more or less treatment each step of the way. Once brightness was more in control, we were able to replace the sky with the stylized IR cloud look used throughout the season’s night scenes. All of this required working very closely with the show’s colorist to ensure the result would be consistent and realistic for them to mold into the final look and color. Some test shots required dozens of versions and iterations to finally lock down a solution. ”
–Pete Steffan | Show Lead

Outer Banks Season 4 parts 1 and 2 are currently available to stream on Netflix.

CADDO LAKE

Caddo Lake is an HBO Max original mystery thriller written and directed by Celine Held and Logan George. The film follows the story of the sudden disappearance of an 8-year-old girl and strange things happening on Caddo Lake.

We had a great experience working on this film and are proud to say that Cadence Effects is the main visual effects vendor on Caddo Lake. Tackling 83 shots including 3D Set Extensions and on-set vfx supervision. Cadence was tasked with intense car chases, CGI elements, blue screen replacements, sky enhancements, rain effects, and more. Check out the reel below to see a breakdown of a few of our shots.

The film stars Dylan O’Brien, Eliza Scanlen, Diana Hopper, Caroline Falk, Sam Hennings, Eric Lange, and Lauren Ambrose. Caddo Lake was produced by M. Night Shyamalan and Blinding Edge Pictures and is available to stream on Max.