Thriller Screen Graphics

In a surveillance thriller, the screens are a character. Sixty insert shots — phones, laptops, a CCTV wall — every interface designed to be read in under a second and believed for the whole film.

The brief

A feature thriller needed its digital world built after the shoot: actors had played scenes against green-fill screens, and the story’s key reveals happened in messages, map traces and camera feeds. The graphics had to carry plot, match the film’s palette, and survive 4K scrutiny in close-up.

How we approached it

We designed the fictional operating system first — one visual language for every device in the film, so the phone a character uses in act one belongs to the same world as the CCTV wall in act three. Screens were animated to the actors’ actual eyelines and finger taps, then tracked and comped into the plates with screen-glass reflections rebuilt on top. Story beats were storyboarded with the editor so every insert lands its information exactly on the cut.

“Screen graphics fail when each department designs its own devices. We build the film’s whole operating system once, and every insert inherits it — that’s why it reads as one world.”

Daniel Evans — VFX Supervisor, vedrí