Visual Effects

What visual effects covers

Everything added to the picture after it was shot. In practice this ranges from ambitious, a set extension or a composited element, to entirely routine, replacing a phone number in a lower third for a different country.

The routine end is where most international campaigns actually spend their budget, and where most of the errors happen.

What we produce

• Titles, lower thirds and animated typography
• Motion graphics and explanatory animation
• Compositing and green screen work
• Clean-up, rig removal and logo replacement
• On-screen text and graphics localised per market

Localising on-screen text

This is the step most often forgotten until launch week. The voice has been recorded in eleven languages and someone notices the graphics are still in English. Then it emerges the project files are missing, the font has no Cyrillic or Greek coverage, and the translated line is 40 percent longer than the box it has to sit in.

We plan for this before the original is finished: we ask for editable projects, check font coverage for every target script, and design text areas with room to expand. Where the original was not built with localisation in mind, we rebuild the graphics rather than pasting text over the top.

Right-to-left languages

Arabic and Hebrew are not a font substitution. Layout direction flips, and graphics designed to read left to right need reconstructing rather than mirroring. We handle these as a design task, not a translation task.

Send the project files or the master and tell us the markets.