Emmy Award-winning VFX company Zoic Studios (www.zoicstudios.com) recently dropped a compilation reel of their best work on Netflix’s 2018 hit series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The show is equal parts fright, magic and excitement, and returned with Part 2 of Season 1 on April 5th.
The Zoic team, led by executive creative director/partner Andrew Orloff, worked closely with production designer Lisa Soper and showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa to maintain the foreboding aesthetic of the series, constructing seamless VFX that merged stylistically with practical effects.
The team developed a wide range of visual effects for the series, including magic effects, prosthetic enhancements, creature effects and photoreal animal CG, like Ms. Wardwell’s raven Stolas. Additional VFX included set extensions and environmental enhancements. All of the VFX carefully blends with the overarching style of the show, paralleling Sabrina’s own dual identities in the magic and mortal realms.
With specialized lenses leveraged to capture very distinctive streaks of light and striking distortions, Zoic was tasked with ensuring their visuals would blend with principal photography, which led the studio to develop an in-house software to mimic those lens distortions.
On-set VFX supervisor Kevin Struckman worked with the creative team to ensure that every VFX shot best maintained the visual depth of the meticulously crafted production design when the Zoic team began enhancing footage in post. Zoic VFX supervisor Ian Fenton and producer Steve Melchiorre oversaw the more than 50 shots featured in the first 10 episodes of the show.