CoSA VFX Brings a Tsunami to the Nancy Drew Season 3 Finale

By Craig Byrne Nancy Drew February 4, 2022

A tsunami hit the fictional town of Horseshoe Bay in last week’s season finale of Nancy Drew on That CW, and we spoke with several members of the team – CoSA Partner and VFX Supervisor Tom Mahoney, VFX Producer Michael Yu, On-Set VFX Supervisor Nikolai Michaleski, CG Supervisor Chris Ryan, and Compositing Supervisor Francisco Palomares about what went into this key sequence.

“When we first read the script, we were like “Oh! A tsunami! That’s going to be challenging, but everyone was really excited to do it,” Tom Mahoney recalls. The CG team immediately laid the groundwork for the sequence, doing water simulation tests even before we received the footage.

In preparation for this complex sequence, CG Supervisor Chris Ryan took photography of the entire town that doubles as Horseshoe Bay so that the team could reconstruct and rebuild it as collision objects and geometry for the tidal wave to interact with.

According to Chris, it was a big challenge to get all of the small details right, but as you can see, it provided a photo-real look for the disaster to occur. Those details didn’t just involve the tidal wave: There were elements all throughout “Horseshoe Bay” that had to be recreated in CG so they could interact with the water. Additionally, the photography was used as valuable reference by our matte painting team to be able to properly cleanplate and remove existing elements from the footage, which were then replaced by their CG counterparts. These elements included sidewalks, roadways, buildings, electrical wires, trees, all kinds of cars… even a boat that eagle-eyed viewers might notice is named “Aglaeca” was a part of the sequence.

The matte painting team re-created the cleanplates from photography, which were then integrated masterfully by our Compositing team led by Francisco Palomares. It was a group effort to make this sequence work; Francisco praised the CG and DMP teams for making their work in integrating the various sequences elements fairly seamless.

As the sequence began, a helicopter shot from an earlier season had to be used to transform day-to-night as the tsunami approached. “Kudos to the matte painting team, because they had to match this opening shot to look like the others,” Tom says. “Fortunately, [the day shot] was taken on an overcast day, so they were able to relight it and get it to feel the same as the other tsunami shots.”

“It’s definitely [one of] the most complicated shots we’ve ever done on the show, and it’s some of the most gorgeous work that’s been done,” Executive Producer Noga Landau said in a recent interview. “CoSA built everything! They built the look of the wave and the destruction, how it rips off the propeller monument that sits right at the shore of Horseshoe Bay, and it takes down all of the electrical wires, and the lights, and cars that get swept up in it. It’s amazing what CoSA built for that sequence.”

On-Set VFX Supervisor Nikolai Michaleski has the same appreciation for our valued clients, who have consistently given the team creative freedom in building visual effects for Nancy Drew. They’ve given our artists great opportunities for being creative, and it has been a thrill to see these things on the screen.

Furthermore, CoSA VFX Partner and VFX Supervisor Tom Mahoney expresses his gratitude to finale director Larry Teng for his work on the episode, giving the right pieces to the team for a great foundation to work on, with the final results clear on screen.

You can see the tsunami sequence below along with other fantastic visual effects from the season finale of Nancy Drew.

ABOUT CoSA VFX

Founded in 2009, CoSA VFX has grown from a small boutique into a thriving visual effects studio with offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Vancouver. The CoSA VFX team has received Emmy nominations and wins for their work on TV series including Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Almost Human, Revolution, and Gotham, and currently provides visual effects for multiple studios, networks and streaming television services.

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