From de-ageing Bill Nighy to shaping psychological landscapes, Vine FX crafted narrative-driven visual effects in Harlan Coben’s Lazarus, the mind-bending thriller series from New York Times best-selling author Harlan Coben.
Cambridge, UK, Joel Lazarus (Sam Claflin) returns home to confront long-buried trauma after the apparent suicide of his father, Dr Jonathan Lazarus (Bill Nighy). As he begins to uncover unsettling clues and experience strange phenomena, Joel is drawn into a cold case tied to his sister’s unsolved murder 25 years earlier. Based on an original story by New York Times best-selling author Harlan Coben and adapted by BAFTA winner Danny Brocklehurst, the series blends psychological suspense with themes of grief, memory, and buried truths. The cast also includes Kate Ashfield, Karla Crome, David Fynn, Alexandra Roach, and more.
The Challenges of De-ageing Recognisable Faces
Led by Creative Director Simon Carr, the team were acutely aware of preserving high-profile actors’ identities, performances, and emotional nuance. The Vine FX team faced this challenge head-on with the de-ageing of Bill Nighy and Amanda Root, opting for a hybrid pipeline of cutting-edge CG, machine learning, and seamless compositing techniques to maintain the soul of the performances while reducing the years. “Retaining Bill Nighy’s performance was key,” said Carr. “Bill’s face presents a unique VFX challenge, it’s instantly recognisable and deeply expressive. Obviously the clients wanted a believable finish, so they didn’t want to change his glasses or hairstyle too drastically in the de-ageing process.” “Visual subtlety was essential,” explained CG Lead Matt McKinney, noting that while full-CG replacements provided maximum control, complete replacement wasn’t the goal. “The CG model looked great on its own,” he added, “but when you compared it to the original plate, the differences stood out.” Instead, the team lent towards a mixed approach, using CG elements to control topology, lighting, and hair, while compositing key aspects of the original plate, especially the eyes and mouth regions, to retain micro-expressions. “We ended up using bits of both,” said Carr.
“It’s not pure CG, we always blend in original elements for subtlety, as performance preservation is paramount. We’re capturing minuscule performances, retaining tiny tics, little twitchy mannerisms, and micro-expressions. This is what makes de-ageing believable,” added Jake Newton, CG Lead.
The multi-pronged method was a clear winner. CG head construction for precise control over facial structure, lighting behaviour and machine learning models trained on synthetic face-pair datasets (young/old). This marked the team’s first full-CG de-ageing pipeline, and with it came a steep learning curve. The team’s R&D Developer, Peter Noble, developed a domain-constrained de-ageing model trained on thousands of facial images, specifically tuned for this project by biasing it toward older male facial features to reduce noise and computational overhead, drawing on research from L’Oréal and Disney. The team then finished with a compositing blend that retained original elements, helping to preserve delicate expressions. Facial capture was done using Unreal Engine’s Live Link Face App, supported by FACS (Facial Action Coding System) libraries to map plausible facial shapes. While effective, early outputs pushed the digital likeness too far. “What we were coming up with was more caricatured at first,” said McKinney. “We had to tone it all back to capture the actor’s nuance, and hand‐refining to achieve natural micro‐movement.”
Amanda Root’s role posed a different kind of challenge. Her brow furrow is key to her emotional delivery, and standard smoothing approaches threatened to erase that nuance. “If you de-age and smooth Amanda’s face too much, you essentially lose 90% of her performance,” noted Carr. To address this, the team leaned heavily on CopyCat-based methods in Nuke, allowing compositors to make frame-specific adjustments that preserved expressive fidelity. “For De-Aging that did not require a full CG, or even ML approach, the team found Nuke’s Copycat tool to be invaluable.”
At every step, the team focused on one guiding principle: the actors’ performances were sacred. Every tool, from CG heads to machine learning processes, was employed in service of what was captured on set. Crucially, it was the compositor’s eye and skill in blending these different techniques that brought everything together, providing the essential finishing touch. By embracing subtlety and hybridisation, the final result preserved not only the look, but the essence of the characters. “It was truly about honouring the performance,” Carr concluded.
Delivering a Seamless Atmosphere
As sole VFX vendor, Vine FX was embedded in the creative process from the start of the project. Working closely with the Quay Street Productions and Prime Video teams and aligning with the show’s various directors, Vine FX delivered over 235 shots across 6 episodes. As the story demanded a fusion of the past and present, a haunting exploration of generational trauma, woven within an intense web of psychological suspense. The VFX environment mandate was just as ambitious: to create a world with a consistent atmosphere and entirely indistinguishable visual effects. The Vine FX team was tasked with creating a visual language that felt slightly futuristic and neither overtly British nor rigidly North American, but evocative, moody, and international in tone. “The clients wanted the environment to appeal to a broader audience and feel neither distinctly UK nor North American,” said Kaitlyn Beattie, Executive VFX Producer. “Shooting in Manchester and Liverpool gave the show an urban backbone, but the team was asked to obfuscate location cues, insert extensions, and create variations in weather and lighting that emphasised claustrophobia, density, and tension.”
City Extensions, Claustrophobic World-Building and Gore
One of the show’s defining visual themes was urban compression, buildings crowding in, the sky nearly squeezed out, with rain and darkness pressing into almost every frame. Vine FX environment work played a central role in achieving this. A standout ‘hero shot’ began low on the street and gradually revealed a skyline of skyscrapers. “Because the filming locations (Manchester and Liverpool) are so recognisable, the challenge was to create city extensions that felt believable yet geographically unplaceable. Selling scale was also tricky. We had to make buildings feel huge without relying on foreground placement,” noted Carr. “We used Google Maps and Earth to anchor CG buildings to real street layouts and ensure accurate proportions.”
Another key environment was the psychiatric hospital, shot in a repurposed hotel but designed to feel isolated on a cliff outside the city. “The hospital is a mix of brutalist and Art Deco style extensions. Though still stark – scenes set here were marginally brighter, edged with hopeful light, and counterpointed against the gloom of the city,” said Carr. The team extended structures, added fencing, trees, hills, and replaced the sea with a cliff edge. Visually, the city scenes leaned heavily into moody, overcast tones with consistent wet-downs. Rain was also added in CG. “The clients loved rain. Everything was wet down, even mirrors and reflections – wetness was pervasive,” Carr continued, noting one particularly complex shot. “The client wanted a CG city extension through a wet windscreen with wipes – that gave us all heart palpitations, but the finished work looks fantastic,” said Carr. “We’re really proud of this one, especially under time pressure. It was tricky, but the team absolutely nailed it.”
The team also tackled a critical sequence, where a statue was used to brutally fracture the victim’s skull. As practical film on-set could not depict such internal gore, the team created a complete CG head destruction sequence. “The starting point was to recreate the hairstyle of the actor and get that all sitting tracked and sitting in the shots. And then we modelled the skull, and internal membranes, brain matter, bone fragments, and blood.” The team then simulated fragmentation, particle flows, and fluid mixing in a controlled but visceral way. “At one point, we were being reigned back on how far we could go with it. It was quite extreme, but the clients were pleased with the result.” The team carefully blended transitions between plate and CG so that the effect was gory but seamless, and always anchored in the actor’s performance.
Creative Continuity & Collaboration in a Compressed Schedule
With three directors across six episodes, maintaining a consistent tone required careful coordination. The first block’s director, Wayne Yip, established the show’s visual language and internal world rules. Subsequent directors Nicole Volavka and Daniel O’Hara referenced this foundation as they developed their own scenes, but aligned with their own artistic flair, particularly in action or character-driven sequences.
Consistency was further supported by having a single VFX vendor across the entire production. “Being the only vendor definitely made stylistic consistency easier, and also let us move more efficiently when it came to client feedback,” said Carr. When the schedule was unexpectedly moved up mid-post, rather than disrupt the workflow, the Vine FX team doubled down on the process and tightened feedback loops. Once the client signed off on a shot, changes were minimised to avoid spiralling revisions. “If a decision is made, you really don’t want to revisit it later, especially under tight time constraints, so that process discipline is critical.” Having directors who respected these boundaries was essential to keeping the show on track. “We put together an excellent plan as a team and implemented structured systems to absorb the pressure. Frame.io annotation and client engagement also significantly reduced the time required for shot review. In the end, we actually delivered ahead of schedule,” Beattie added. All six episodes of Harlan Coben’s Lazarus are now available to watch on Prime Video.
Jon Creamer
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