Boardwalk Empire rebuilt 1920s Atlantic City every week, and almost none of it existed. Brainstorm Digital handled the bulk of that work, and their season two reel is a good look at effects designed specifically not to be noticed.
The hardest VFX job is the invisible one
A dragon gets graded on whether it looks cool. A 1920s boardwalk gets graded on whether anyone notices it is fake. Only one of those is forgiving.
Audiences have no reference for what a dragon should look like. They have an enormous amount of reference for what a street looks like, even a street from a century ago. Get the light wrong on a building and people feel it before they can explain it.
What the reel is actually showing you
Mostly set extension. A practical set gets built to a useful height, maybe a storefront and a bit of boardwalk, and everything above and beyond it is added later.
- Period buildings extending above the practical set
- Digital crowds filling a boardwalk that had a few dozen extras on it
- Ocean and sky replacement, because modern coastline gives the game away
- Removal work, taking out anything modern that crept into frame
Why period drama eats VFX budget
A science fiction show invents its world, so anything it puts on screen is correct by definition. A period show has to match a world that existed and that people can look up.
That means research, reference photography and a lot of shots that contain no obvious effect at all. It is why prestige period television routinely carries shot counts comparable to a genre film, while looking like it has no effects in it.
What changed since 2012
The tools got faster and the standard went up with them. Crowd systems, projection-based extensions and better tracking all made this kind of work quicker to produce.
What did not change is the judgement. Deciding how dirty a wall should be, or how much haze sits between the camera and a distant building, is still a person making a call. That part has not been automated and probably will not be soon.
Brainstorm Digital after the show
The New York facility went on to do the same kind of invisible period work on The Greatest Showman, The Irishman and Wolf of Wall Street. Their niche is rebuilding cities that no longer exist, which is a strange speciality and a durable one.
Plenty of shops that were busy in 2012 did not last. We keep a running reference list of defunct VFX houses if you want a sense of how volatile that decade was.
If you want to get better at spotting this kind of work, our guide to what a VFX breakdown is and what to look for covers the tells.
