The King's Man - Russian War Room (2018)

Sometimes what seems like the most mundane assignments can turn out to be the most complex challenges. In this case a simple re-dressing of an existing shooting location, the Palazzo Reale in Turin, as the Russian War Room.

While the location scout had provided many great photos, none of them were from the angle the director wanted for this shot. What's more, there were no measurements of the space. So the first challenge was to perspective-warp a grid over the photos in Photoshop, basing my scale on recognizable elements in the image, and reverse-engineering basic dimensions for a block model. I then dropped the photos into Modo as background images, matched the camera to my rough model and projection-mapped the edited photos into the geometry. With the image mapped correctly to the model, I could then extrude mouldings, windows, doors, etc. until the textures "snapped" into correct perspective, a very quick and interactive process. This gave me a perfect digital set I could then dress with a combination of models, photo textures, and both painted and historically photo-bashed figures. Having the location in 3D also allowed me to use render passes such as depth, shading incidence and surface ID as masks to paint in lighting, shadow and atmosphere.