Picture post for the feature-length festive special of Charlie Brooker’s dark satire

Technicolor’s editing and design team, including senior editor and VFX artist Simon Giblin and VFX artist Andrew Maddison. It took just three weeks to work on over 300 VFX shots. Shoot supervision and graphic design was undertaken by Painting Practice, and Technicolor’s work involved seamlessly integrating these elements within the shots, including numerous monitor and phone inserts.

Senior Editor and VFX artist, Simon Giblin spoke about his favourite aspects of this project: ‘The interior of Greta’s “cookie” was interesting as we had to create an environment from scratch to incorporate a wall-sized screen as well as a console interface. We also added the light to the egg containing Greta’s cookie, and animated it to reflect the passing of time within. I have a soft spot for that egg – it almost became a character of its own! We also worked on the development of the “Zedeyes” look and the blocking effect. These went through several iterations before the final versions the viewers saw were agreed upon’

Simon added that ‘One of the most challenging shots was the borescope extraction scene where the cookie is removed from Greta’s head. We had to marry up two plates and add textures to metal and the camera lens. There was also clean-up work to do on the prosthetic on Greta’s head’.

Dan Coles, Senior Colourist at Technicolor London undertook work on some scenes, such as making plates shot in September look like midwinter by adding snow enhancement and refinement, and evened out the ground in the market scene at the end of the film because it had rained during shooting which meant that consecutive shots didn’t match.

Simon Giblin summed up the project by saying ‘It is always an enjoyable experience to interpret Charlie Brooker’s vision into reality and this film was no exception with three separate interwoven stories all bringing their own unique set of challenges’.