The Union team delivered a whole host of creatively challenging VFX for the Netflix series. Dept Q, based on the Danish novel series by Jussi Adler-Olsen, created and directed by Scott Frank.

Starring Matthew Goode and Kelly McDonald, the series centres around Carl Morck, a brilliant but troubled detective relegated to a cold case unit after a shooting incident leaves his partner paralysed and a colleague dead. 

Forced to work in a neglected basement office, he reluctantly leads the newly formed Department Q, a PR stunt designed to distract from the police force's failures. With the help of a former Syrian police officer and other misfit detectives, Morck reopens a high-profile cold case involving the disappearance of a prominent civil servant.

The Union team was led by VFX Supervisors  Tim Barter and Dillan Nicholls alongside VFX Producers Rob Vassie and Paul O’Hara.  

The work involved a vast amount of blood and gore, muzzle flashes, sweat and bruise additions, blue screen window replacements, and some tricky green screen photograph replacements, a TV being smashed through a window, landing on a car and a CG roof extension.  The team also generated a series of computer game-style police animatic shots, which they created from scratch. 

VFX Producer Rob Vassie, on the challenges involved, “Probably the biggest challenge was generating the police animatic shots. These needed to represent the events in the series’ opening scene, where the lead characters are shot whilst investigating a crime scene. 

“We had a very open brief from the director, which was great as that gave us a lot of creative latitude with the design of the shots. We had the freedom to explore various ideas, which was very rewarding. 

“We started with a very simple pre-vis style animatic for the police crime scene reconstruction, based on reference material that we found.  We deliberately didn’t add any VFX polish to it to make it look like it had been made by the police as opposed to a VFX house. We then added more cinematic elements, including camera moves and reactions that you wouldn’t see in a police reconstruction. The aim here was to unsettle the viewer, taking us into the character's world as he blurred his own memories and emotions with the police reconstruction.”

Dept Q is currently streaming on Netflix.