MPC - Arnaud Fouquet, VFX supervisor at MPC Paris, was responsible for the overall supervision of the Netflix film “Sous La Seine”, directed by Xavier Gens. The film features 677 VFX shots in all, produced in collaboration between the MPC Paris and Liège, Digital District and UFX teams.

Arnaud Fouquet and Loriane Lucas, VFX Producer at MPC Paris and Liège, coordinated the creation of 288 shots. These included sequences produced entirely in CGI, under the supervision of Florian Wolff and Ryan Bardoul.

"In order to obtain realistic shark movements and behaviors, we extensively studied shark morphology and movements. On each of the shots to be faked, Augustin Paliard, our chief animator, had associated precise video references with the type of movements we wanted to have. When an animator started a shot, he automatically had these references.

As with the animations, we collected a huge number of references to analyze the appearance, textures and details of the sharks. We quickly realized that skin rendering could take on very different appearances depending on the light and the orientation of the shark, sometimes matte, sometimes satin and sometimes even metallic. Florian Wolff, sup CG, and Maxime Chaix, sup Comp, worked together to develop a method for achieving these different renderings.

The other important parameter to take into account was the influence of water on colorimetry. The turbidity of the water influences the depth at which colors disappear: red disappears between 0 and 5 meters, orange between 10 and 15, and yellow between 15 and 25 meters. For the shoot, I specially made a submersible chrome ball, and for each shark shot, I asked a diver to follow the shark's trajectory with this ball and a color chart, which enabled us to recover all the color variations we could apply to our CG sharks."