Havoc is a 2025 action thriller film written and directed by Gareth Evans.
Overview
After a drug deal gone wrong, a bruised detective must fight his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician's estranged son, unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.
We are extremely proud of the final sequence, a testament to Gareth's visionary direction and the creative leadership of Charlie Noble and Kieron Helsdon. We are immensely grateful to the hundreds of people who contributed over three years, and proud of the work we created together.
The Dupe VFX work on Havoc centered around a complex truck chase sequence, beginning with an innovative approach to previs (pre-visualization). Dupe collaborated with director Gareth to plan key VFX sequences using a hands-on, animated previs in Unreal Engine, leveraging iPad AR technology for R&D on location. This setup allowed the director to be hands-on with the virtual camera and action, with final takes delivered as QuickTimes for editing the sequence.
A significant challenge arose when the plan shifted from using the previs for live-action shoot planning to delivering the whole chase as a full CG sequence with only live action greenscreen inserts for the stunt and actor performances. This necessitated a difficult transition into a completely different workflow, whilst the team worked to honor the previs's good elements and Gareth’s fine tuned camera and action choreography. Technical hurdles included having to scale the environment by 100% due to overlap in the edit and facing technical challenges in exporting and re-adjusting cameras captured in the Unreal Engine setup, which was not initially tested for full CG transition. In retrospect, the team would have defined and locked down the environment layout, refined sequence animation, and conducted more R&D on game engine-to-post-production data workflows from the start. That said the work completed and innovation achieved has seen Dupe’s pipeline and workflows become world-class in the flow of previs to final shot delivery.
The scope change also presented challenges to infrastructure and the 3D pipeline. A key aspect of this transition was the adoption of Universal Scene Description (USD). The unexpected shift to full CG heavily stressed this new USD-based setup, requiring continuing R&D. The studio had to expand its hardware—including server room, storage, render capacity, and artist machines—and adapt in-house management by bringing in more heads of departments.
The energy and vision captured in the previs sequence by Gareth Evans kept the team motivated throughout the journey on this movie as we could see how fantastic the sequence was going to be. We are extremely proud of how it came together with Gareth’s visionary direction and additional creative leadership from Charlie Noble and Kieron Helsdon.
We pulled together hundreds of people across three years on this journey and we are immensely grateful for their efforts and extremely proud of the work that we created together.
