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CASE STUDY Netflix

Creating perfect pixels

Netflix and Accenture Song teamed up to slay a monster. And turn a spaceship into a boat. Here’s how our team used visual effects to bring the ideas to life, pixel by pixel.

3-MINUTE READ

Go big and go home

Demand is high for big-screen effects on small screens. Netflix alone has 231 million subscribers—and the competition is as fierce as consumer appetites, with industry value expected to hit $330B by 2030, up from $60B in 2021.

To bring cinematic impact to some of the streaming services’ most popular shows, Accenture Song hand-selected the right talent based on technical and artistic skills, as well as passion for and interest in the shows themselves. The team worked with advanced software tools for each project, one pixel at a time, customizing out-of-the-box tools to solve specific challenges.

Watch how Netflix and Accenture Song used ground-breaking visual effects to bring a key moment to life in season 4 of the top series “Stranger Things.”

Keep it human

For Season 4 of “Stranger Things,” Song created effects for a pivotal scene in which the heroes attack the villain Vecna with fire. To get the villain ready for the fight, our designers re-built Vecna in CGI so his reactions to fire simulations and shotgun impacts would look believable.

The final scene shows flames striking the character while preserving actor Jamie Campbell Bower’s performance and facial expressions throughout the sequence.

Think small

If a CGI character falls to the floor, the floor must be recreated in the computerized sequence. If wind blows against a creature’s back, artists need to account for how each hair will move.

For “Lost in Space,” the Accenture team took on visual effects for the Jupiter, the Robinson family’s spaceship that appears in every episode. For a scene in season 2 in which the Jupiter transforms into a sailing vessel, we built a deeply complex, photorealistic water simulation. The team also designed alien creatures for the show, starting with classic 2D artwork based on real-life animals and transforming it into 3D CGI models.

Each pixel adds up. For “Lost in Space,” we created 655 shots over 18 episodes, as well as 88 full CG shots—scenes in which everything on screen is computer generated—some of the most complex work in the industry.

Watch next

Netflix and Accenture Song recently worked together on two new shows – “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “Bone and Shadow” Season 2 and will continue to collaborate on future seasons of some of the streaming platform’s premium series.

As new series continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible on screen, Accenture Song’s broader experience in state-of-the-art visualization capabilities, augmented reality and other new technologies means it is ready to provide creative solutions to future challenges.

Accenture’s VFX work for Netflix received:

5

Primetime Emmy Nominations

2

Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards Nominations

MEET THE TEAM

Heiko Burkardsmaier

VFX Executive Producer – Accenture Song

Emanuel Fuchs

VFX Supervisor – Accenture Song

Apollonia Hartmann

VFX Producer – Accenture Song

Iggy Rau

VFX Producer – Accenture Song