After The Flood: Season 2

Returning for the second season of ITV’s crime thriller After the Flood, Vine FX stepped up as the sole VFX vendor, delivering 336 shots across 94 sequences. Following the success of Season 1, the Cambridge-based studio reunited with Director Azhur Saleem and Quay Street Productions to evolve the show’s visual language—transitioning from the catastrophic floods of the debut to the simmering, high-stakes environmental threats of the sequel.

Led by Executive VFX Supervisor Michael Illingworth and VFX Supervisor Alesja Surubkina, the team provided a full suite of effects spanning all six episodes. The work ranged from ambitious R&D-driven environments to invisible performance enhancements, all designed to amplify the tension of DI Jo Marshall’s (Sophie Rundle) latest investigation.

A primary challenge of the season involved a sprawling moorland fire sequence in the opening episode. Because the location was a protected area, practical burns were prohibited and on-set smoke was minimal. Vine FX was tasked with building a terrifyingly realistic wildfire from scratch.

“We gathered reference photography and studied how grass and smoke behave, which is very different from structural fires,” said Surubkina. To achieve this, CG Supervisor Tim Kilgour and FX Artist Josh Curtis developed a custom, procedural fire simulation system in Houdini. This allowed the team to "paint" fire onto the plates, ensuring the flames felt organic and alive rather than repetitive. As the client saw the early tests, the brief expanded, adding more intensity and embers to heighten the narrative impact.

For the season’s climax—a dramatic fall from a treacherous cliff—Vine FX moved away from traditional mesh-based geometry in favor of cutting-edge Gaussian Splatting. By using drone-captured photography to reconstruct the environment as a high-detail volumetric representation, the team created a three-dimensional photographic base of the real-world location.

“It’s essentially like building up a scene from lots of soft, fuzzy points rather than rigid geometry,” explained R&D Engineer Peter Noble. To ensure the environment remained production-ready, the studio employed a hybrid workflow, blending the splats with CG environment patches and digital matte paintings to smooth transitions and maintain perfect continuity across the sequence.

Beyond the headline simulations, Vine FX delivered extensive "invisible" work to maintain the show’s gritty realism. This included advanced face-tracking to integrate blood, sweat, and minor injuries into close-up performances, and the creation of a detailed CG flood wall that served as a crucial narrative link to Season 1.

“With this type of work, it’s always about supporting the story, not drawing attention to the VFX,” noted Simon Carr, VFX Supervisor & Creative Director. From digital inserts and CCTV frames to complex water simulations, the studio’s meticulous compositing ensured that the environmental stakes remained front and center.

After the Flood Season 2 is available to stream on ITVX.