Night Watch — VFX Studio

Project overview

An eight-episode series shot largely in daylight that needed convincing night skies, painted horizons and consistent continuity across a whole season.

Category: Series
Year: 2025
Format: Episodic series
Episodes: 8
Shots: 640
Delivery: UHD HDR
Services: Environments, Compositing

01Creative brief

Turn day-for-night exteriors into rich, starlit skies that feel photographed, and do it on an episodic schedule.

02The challenge

Schedules allowed only daylight exteriors. Each episode needed dozens of sky replacements with matching interactive light on actors, vehicles and buildings.

03Approach & execution

We built a library of painted night skies and a reusable relight setup in compositing, so artists could move from plate to approved shot quickly while the supervisor kept the season's look consistent.

VFX breakdown

Drag to compare plate and final

Sky replacements480
Matte paintings22
Turnaround per episode3 weeks
Delivered asUHD HDR

Final night sky composite with the Milky Way

Raw plateFinal comp

In detail

Behind the shots

Each episode was turned over in batches. A shared sky library and relight template let the compositing team hit the series look on the first version, and the supervisor reviewed every episode end to end to keep continuity between scenes shot weeks apart.

Gallery