Arnaud Fouquet, VFX Supervisor at MPC Paris, served as Overall VFX Supervisor on the Netflix film Under Paris, directed by Xavier Gens. The film features 677 VFX shots, delivered through a collaboration between MPC Paris and Liège, Digital District, and UFX.

Arnaud Fouquet and Loriane Lucas, VFX Producer at MPC Paris and Liège, oversaw the production of 288 shots. This work includes fully CG sequences supervised by Florian Wolff and Ryan Bardoul.

Arnaud Fouquet explains the work carried out by MPC teams:

“To achieve realistic movement and behavior for the shark, we conducted extensive research into shark morphology and motion. For each shot, our Head of Animation, Augustin Paliard, provided precise video references aligned with the type of movement we were aiming for. When an animator started working on a shot, these references were immediately available.”

“As with animation, we gathered a large amount of reference material to study the look, textures, and details of sharks. We quickly realized that the appearance of the skin could vary significantly depending on lighting and orientation, sometimes matte, sometimes satin-like, and at times even metallic. Florian Wolff, CG Supervisor, and Maxime Chaix, Comp Supervisor, worked closely together to develop a methodology capable of reproducing these variations.“

“Another key factor was the impact of water on color. Water turbidity affects how quickly colors disappear with depth: red fades between 0 and 5 meters, orange between 10 and 15 meters, and yellow between 15 and 25 meters. For the shoot, I specifically designed a submersible chrome sphere, and for each shark shot, I asked a diver to follow the shark’s path with this sphere along with a color chart. This allowed us to capture accurate color variations that we could then apply to our CG sharks.”

Under Paris is available on Netflix.