A French science fiction blockbuster, Chien 51 was a major challenge of 2025. As Lead FX, my work began early on this film to propose visuals to the director, who had given us creative freedom on a large part of the film.

My work was broken down into 4 areas:

• the art direction for Alma;
• the drone destruction;
• the visual interpretation of the drone’s point of view;
• the virtual set background for the live broadcast.

Alma’s Art Direction

Alma is the artificial intelligence that assists the police in solving investigations. As a fully-fledged character in the Chien 51 universe, we had to think carefully about the graphic style in which the AI expressed itself. Cédric Fayolle discovered the work of Alex Le Guillou, with whom we collaborated to determine the visual style of the crime scene reconstructions.

Here are two reconstruction sequences using the setup I was able to put in place:

These reconstruction designs also appear on Alma’s surveillance screens.

Alma’s animated logo also appears throughout the film across the various interfaces. To build it, I started from a strange attractor system. The initial concept had been proposed by motion designer Tom Kan.

Drone Destruction

The drone design was a major undertaking at Digital District, masterfully led by Jonathan Breuer. My job was to prepare the drone destruction setup so that it would be as controllable as possible and fully procedural. This was an essential requirement, since the drone’s design kept evolving in parallel with the destruction simulations.

Drone POV

The interface elements were handled in compositing. On the FX side, our goal was to convey a sense that the drone was visually interacting with the environment. We settled on a sonar-style effect over the set.

Before arriving at a clean, elegant result, we went through rougher stages where the drone literally scanned the entire set.

Destiny Virtual Set

In the film, the children of Zone 3 have the opportunity to take part in a Go 2.0 game show that will allow them to pursue their studies in Zone 2. This show is called Destiny. We had very little time before shooting to design and create a background for the show. In an initial version, we proposed a design where grids and circles symbolized the game of Go.

In the end, we proposed a different version where Zone 2 is visible in gold in the background, symbolizing the participants’ hope of joining it.

To learn more about the full VFX work on the project, you can check out Cédric Fayolle’s interview with Art of VFX.