The post-production of The World After

Once we shot everything for The World After, we had to start the post-production of the cinematic part of the game.

Special effects and visual effects

I made an article about the special effects of the game, but once you have special effects, you can improve them with visual effects. Visual effects can be made with a variety of softwares, for our purposes we used Houdini, Adobe After Effects and DaVinci Resolve Fusion.

It doesn’t look like it, but almost every shot of The World After is filled with VFX. From sky replacement inside interactive scenes to the most visual striking ones, the VFX for the game took months to make, essentially by myself.

Green screens and chroma key

For the Tannhaüser Gate at the end of the game, we shot the scene first empty to have the background reference. Then with the character in front of a green screen, and keyed it inside Fusion. After that, we asked the super talented Pierre-Olivier Thévenin to design a warp gate inside Houdini and we added it to the video between the character and the background.

The lights inside the eyes

The most challenging effect to make was to light the eyes of the Nightwatcher. It has seven eye holes on one side, eight on the other, so some of the shots it’s in had 15 eyes to track one by one. Some of the shots are almost a minute long. It took hours to render. After I lit the eyes, I had to make the camera shake for every one of its apparitions. The shots were static, and I applied a known trick among VFX artists : you make a fake camera shake and then you re-stabilize it from a specific point in the frame. In this way, you can have a static character inside a shaky environment.

If you want to know more about post-production, please feel free to let us know in the comments! You can support us by buying our game or our merch.