OCCUPATION

Occupation is a powerful new three-part drama serial from BBC Northern Ireland for BBC One, that traces the lives of three British soldiers from the invasion of Basra in March 2003 to the present.

Commissioned by Jane Tranter, Controller, BBC Fiction, Occupation was produced by Laurie Borg for Kudos Film and Television, and directed by Nick Murphy.

The film explores the impact war has on the lives of those who fight and what happens when cultures collide - not just in war, but in peace.

Lola's work started early in pre production and involved supplying VFX supervision on location, to ensure that all the required elements were shot, that would enable the Morocco live action shoot, to stand in for Basra, where the action takes place.

The realism of the Occupation scripts depiction of life on the ground, in occupied Basra, demanded that the visual effects shots are invisible and blend seamlessly with the live action, to offer a convincing sense of place and scale.

Lola worked with director Nick Murphy to realise his vision of life at the Basra airbase by using CG to add production value; supplying crowd replication of soldiers to populate the huge air hangar and subtle use of CG elements to provide extra life and buzz to scenes of a working military base. 

The 2D team at Lola created digital matte paintings of the airbase complex;  designing architecture, control towers, signals, signs and street furniture typical to the military set up - and then composited these elements to build up establishing wide shots of the airbase. 

Military aircraft in flight (shot elsewhere) were tracked into shots and composited into the sky for a number of combat scenes. Combined with computer generated mortar fire tracers, bullet impact shots and explosions the visual effects shots work to create the sense that we are in a real war zone.