Sex, Power and raunchy Visual Effects!
Overview
"Rivals" is a new television series on Disney+ that is an adaptation of the popular Jilly Cooper novel of the same name. Set in the glamorous and often scandalous world of 1980s independent television, the show centers around the fierce rivalry between two powerful figures: Tony Baddingham (David Tennant) & Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex HAssell)
Rupert Campbell-Black
Cameron Cook
"Rivals" immerses viewers in the glamorous and often chaotic world of 1980s television through meticulous attention to detail. From authentically recreated period sets and costumes to the seamless integration of vintage technology, the show's visual style plays a crucial role in transporting audiences back to this iconic era.
Tony Baddingham
Declan O'Hara
Dupe collaborated with longstanding friend Director Elliot Hegarty and Producer Eliza Mellor alongside other HODs to enhance and augment the great onset work and bring home some gorgeously invisible VFX work. Key highlights being all the screen work, some tricky wig fixes, a CG fox, CG pheasants and of course some nudity navigation.
We also contributed to the opening sequence featuring a fully CG Concorde and sky environment.
CG Fox
We collaborated with FABLEfx and their wonderful team of creature specialists and animators to integrate a full CG fox into the fox hunt sequence.
As specialists in CG-animal-wizardry, FABLEfx was perfectly suited for this project. Delivering this type of VFX requires absolute precision—it has to look like a real fox, with no shortcuts taken when striving for total photorealism.
All our digital animals are built to be anatomically correct, starting with a skeleton and then adding layers of fat and muscle before finalizing textures and fur, which ultimately transforms it into a completely photo-real fox. Naturally, muscle and fur simulations are also a crucial part of the process.
However, realism isn’t just about appearance - it’s equally important that the animals move convincingly. Watching countless reference clips of real foxes in the wild helped our skilled animators capture the exact behaviors and movements needed to make this poor little fox feel authentic.
Ironically, in our specialized field of VFX, the best outcome is often when no one notices our work. Viewers should simply believe they’re watching a trained fox captured on camera for the thrilling hunting scenes in Rivals. Ideally, they won’t think about it at all - they’ll just lose themselves in the story without questioning how the scenes were created. We often refer to this as “invisible VFX,” and I think it’s quite an apt description.
Being part of such a beloved and well-received series as Rivals was a fantastic experience, and collaborating with Dupe VFX made the project even more rewarding.