The Woman King

NEXODUS finished 245 shots for VFX Supervisor Sarah Bennet and VFX Producer Claudia Dehmel on the critically acclaimed feature film The Woman King, in the face of a seemingly-impossible deadline and budget.

NEXODUS’ turnkey cloud-based VFX pipeline allowed their team to set the film’s 4K UHD color workflow in a matter of hours and get straight to work. The two NEXODUS compositors dedicated to the project quickly realized they were able to handle more shots than the 30 or so they were initially assigned. As an in-house team billing their time on the show – as opposed to working against fixed bids per shot – this first increase in the NEXODUS shot count came at no additional cost to the client.

“The movie looks beautiful and everyone is happy! We cannot thank NEXODUS enough for helping us with the enormous amount of shots that came our way over the last few months, and the madness of the last week that had us add another shot just hours before delivery. What an incredible achievement, we could not have done this without you.” Claudia Dehmel, VFX Producer

When the main VFX vendor ran short on additional capacity for the show, NEXODUS was able to triple the size of their fully remote team immediately to accommodate over 200 additional shots. Drawing on their extensive network of talent, artists with specialized skills were brought onto the project as and when they were needed. NEXODUS completed a broad range of shots for the film, including CG weapons, blood and fire enhancement, crowd augmentation, environment clean-up, and makeup fixes.

The high volume of new shots arriving late in the post production schedule made the delivery deadline and remaining budget seem almost impossible for a traditional VFX facility. NEXODUS was able to manage their team’s capacity to maximize the amount of shots they could deliver in the time, unimpeded by time-consuming shot-by-shot bidding and cumbersome data IO.

The Woman King was released to overwhelmingly positive reviews, and brought in close to $100M at the global box office. NEXODUS is grateful to Sarah, Claudia and the team at Sony for the opportunity to contribute to this landmark film.