Our Work on The King's Man

The King’s Man explores the origin story of the Kingsman private intelligence agency. Set in WW1 and based on the comic book ‘The Secret Service’, a promising young soldier named Conrad must defeat a group of history’s worst tyrants and fugitive masterminds as they plot a war that will erase millions. 

We were responsible for realising Matthew Vaughn’s vision of an authentic WW1 battleground setting complete with brutal fight scenes, bleak battlegrounds, and plenty of blood splatter. This included building an almost entirely CG ammunitions depot and a vast no-man’s-land environment based on rare historical photographs from WW1.

Another highlight is the brutal hand-to-hand knife fight between two groups of soldiers, set in the middle of no man’s land at night. To increase the tension of this scene, we added a dense fog and subtle blood effects to the plate photography —this required design work by our compositing team, followed by a lot of rotoscoping. But the scene was completely transformed, so it was well worth the effort.  

We also had a small team dedicated to a single hero shot—a stylised 1600-frame montage of three shots that transitions into a time-lapse depicting the destruction of a countryside landscape ravaged by trench warfare.