Image
People
Created by Rowan Atkinson and William Davies
Special Effect Supervisor - Johnny Rafique
Client
Netflix
Type of Production
television
IMDB Link
+44 (0)7968 613040 or +44 (0)7968 613030 info@elementsfx.co.uk
Man Vs Baby
For Season 2, the elements special effects team scaled up the ambition of the motion rigs and on-set physical effects. A huge range of tasks were tackled: placing a ‘baby’ into a rucksack, creating a shopping-cart conga line, operating a wood-burning stove, dressing frost and snow, building a motorised plinth for a gigantic spinning Christmas tree and constructing a scaffold rig for a controlled fall of a tree-topper, producing wind effects, rigging practical taps, another plinth for a revolving statue all crafted inhouse, running a working lift door, creating steam effects, chandelier pulley rigs, and even popping a champagne cork.
The workshop became home to dozens of builds for the production, from small items made in the sticky shop - like dog-safe silicone sticks; to testing the height limit of our workshop with a real 30-foot Christmas tree mounted on a custom motor base powerful enough to rotate the entire tree. We also engineered a rig to launch the star topper from the tree’s peak. The props shop produced not one but three exceptional statues of Achilles, all identical, sculpted and painted to resemble marble and mounted on another custom motorised-plinth with a hyper realistic marble finish.
The set team spent weeks operating the penthouse lift, designing its doors to malfunction and misbehave on demand. They also transformed sets and locations with full white-out snow and frost dressing. Throughout filming, the team stayed constantly on standby, ready at a moment’s notice to pull fishing lines, trigger hidden mechanisms, or animate a rucksack fitted with solenoids and pistons to simulate a baby moving inside.
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