Led by VFX Supervisor Menelaos Pampoukidis, Koala FX delivered over 400 VFX shots for Fall 2: Deadpoint, the sequel to the vertigo-inducing survival thriller Fall.

Directed by Peter and Michael Spierig and produced by Tea Shop Productions and Capstone Pictures, the film follows Jax Hunter, who agrees to a memorial hike up Mount Kwan in Thailand with her late sister’s friend Luce. When a sudden rockslide traps them on a fragile, elevated plank walk thousands of feet in the air, the pair have to survive extreme vertigo, brutal elements, and terrifying drops to make it down.

Koala FX took over full actualisation of the mountain itself, building the CG asset that the entire film hangs off and compositing every shot in which it appears. The team created a full CG extension of Mount Kwan, combining digital matte painting with 2.5D set extensions, and had to rebuild the environment convincingly across a range of conditions: sun, rain, and shifting light, so the mountain reads as one continuous, believable place no matter what the story throws at it. With so much of the film’s tension built on height and exposure, the brief went beyond technical accuracy: Koala FX’s environment work was tasked with actively elevating the film’s fear factor, not just filling in the background behind the actors.

The most demanding sequence was Devil’s Elbow, a fully CG establishing shot of the mountain that introduces the location and has to set the tone for the entire film in a single breath. It wasn’t just a technical build – the team had to think creatively about how the mountain itself was revealed, using scale and framing to land the dread before a single character was in danger.

The rain sequence brought a different kind of challenge. Filmed exterior, across different times of day, the practical lighting shifted from plate to plate, meaning the CG environment had to be built to match a sky and a light source that wasn’t consistent on set. Getting the mountain’s lighting to feel justified by its sky, shot to shot, took a strategic approach to finding that “silver lining” where everything aligned, so the sequence held together once graded.

“We had to look down,” says Menelaos, the team’s own twist on the film’s tagline, Are You Down? “The goal was never just to build a mountain, it was to make people scared of heights. If the audience isn’t feeling the vertigo, we haven’t done our job.”