Gorgeous Galaxies, Brilliant Beasts and Miraculous Magic: 20 Years of The Embassy

Twenty years is a long time in creativity. In fact, it’s a long time anywhere. Two decades ago George Bush was US President, the iPhone was still years away, and nobody had ever heard of ‘social media’. It’s impressive, then, that in the singularly fast-moving world of visual effects and filmmaking, one studio has been able to maintain such a high level of creative output for twenty years. 

And that’s precisely what The Embassy has done. Since 2003, the company has become synonymous with the kind of boundary-pushing, head-turning VFX that makes you ask “how did they do that?” - if you even notice it at all. 

Throughout everything, the studio’s evolution has been entirely organic and creatively-driven. “When we first started out, we were totally focused on commercials”, notes EP and president Winston Helgason. Today, however, the Embassy has extended its reach into the worlds of TV and film alongside its commercial origins. Now, the studio shines in its role as a creative partner which brings the best out of any budget on-screen.

In fact, it’s hard to exist in culture today without noticing the studio’s work. It’s there in Netflix big-hitters like Warrior Nun and Paramount’s upcoming Spiderwick Chronicles. It’s present, too, in movies from the cult classic District 9 to global blockbusters like Marvel’s Iron Man and Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games. That’s in addition to iconic brands like BMW, Nike, and Mentos. In short, The Embassy is everywhere. And it’s a good thing for the industry that it is. 

To coincide with the studio’s 20th birthday, LBB has taken up the unenviable task of picking out five of the company’s greatest projects - including ads, branded content, TV series, and movies. The list below is the result of our team’s effort. 

So without further ado - and in purely chronological order - here are five of the very best pieces of creative work from the past twenty years of The Embassy.

Nike: Evolution

There’s an impressively tactile, visceral quality to the VFX in this classic ad for Nike; and that’s before you realise it was put together in 2004. Perhaps the reason it’s aged so well over the past nineteen years and counting is because of how real it feels to anyone who has owned a pair of the brand’s iconic trainers. 

“The concept, quite simply, was to visualise the evolution of Nike trainers from 1984 to 2004”, recalls Winston. “For us it was a significant technical challenge, not least because there were only around six of us at the company at this point!”. 

Part of that challenge, as Embassy’s president explains, was the fact that traditional animation methods at the time weren’t suited to the look and feel the project required. “We knew from an early stage that stop motion wasn’t going to work”, he says. “Instead, almost by chance, we happened upon a technique where an animated bone chain could rip the shoe apart and give the precise look and feel we wanted. It was out of the box, but it worked”. 

The result was a piece of work which put the then-fledgling studio on the map. “Of course I can remember the technical challenges which would be so much easier for us to overcome today, but that's half the fun of looking back at this stuff,” laughs Winston. Fittingly, that level of perfectionism would soon become a hallmark for the Embassy in the years to come. 

Iron Man 

In 2008, we still lived in a world before the dawn of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That would all change following the release of Iron Man, which saw Robert Downey Jr.’s sarcasm-drenched and charismatic turn as “genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist” Tony Stark supported by some stellar visual effects work from The Embassy. 

“There’s an interesting through line between Nike Evolution to Iron Man”, notes Winston. “We ended up getting a job for Citroën - Alive With Technology - because of that ad, and that Citroën commercial essentially put us on the radar for Iron Man”. 

It turned out that the mech-like movements and feel of the dancing car in that Citroën spot was precisely what was required for the MCU’s debut feature. “It was us up against a list of the biggest and baddest VFX studios anywhere in the world”, says Winston. “But ours was the only company with a note next to our name saying ‘no VFX test required’, thanks to our work on that ad”. 

In the event, Iron Man represented a definitive moment for the Embassy as a studio. “When they saw our first renderings of the suit they ended up tripling the size of the sequence. It ended up being a big chunk of the movie - really complex work”, recounts Winston. “The scaling up we did in response to this job was a line in the sand for our growth. We never really looked back.

A first Oscar nomination followed, and the Vancouver-based studio’s first taste of blockbuster success would be far from its last. 

District 9

It may not have sparked its own cinematic universe, but Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 movie met with an uproarious reception upon its release. An idiosyncratic story about a bumbling but well-meaning South African inspector sent to relocate a slum of aliens, the film won plaudits for its social commentary in addition to its fine visual effects work - particularly when it came to the movie’s climactic exo-suit battle. Credit for the latter is, naturally, due to The Embassy. 

The seamless execution we see on-screen, however, belies the monumental visual challenge that the film presented in practice. “The original brief was actually to put together an organic alien exosuit, which would turn the main character into this kind of hideous, all-powerful bioweapon”, says Winston. “But that was scrapped some way into the original production in favour of the more traditional mech that we see on-screen”. 

As a result of that change, combined with another re-shoot, The Embassy were left with “between three and four months” to put together the entire mech sequence plus visual design on the alien weapons. “All told, it was 130 shots within that time frame”, says Winston. 

The rewards for the studio’s creative graft was another Oscar nomination, and a burgeoning reputation as a VFX house capable of the highest-end feature work. 

BMW M4: Ultimate Racetrack

Visual Effects, it’s often said, are the art of the impossible. And The Embassy’s work on BMW’s ‘Ultimate Racetrack’ is, if not quite impossible, certainly wildly improbable. A state-of-the-art track needed to be placed on top of an aircraft carrier, sailing across the ocean so that any slip-up from the driver would result in a watery fall. 

“This project had us working as a kind of de-facto production company, directly with the agency”, recalls Winston. “And something they were really adamant about was not wanting to use a CG car. The performance driver needed to be totally real, but outrageously reimagined on top of this aircraft carrier”. 

“We ended up shooting the car and extracting it frame-by-frame into the digital environment we built”, says David. “That meant that if there were poles, trees, or anything in the background reflecting on the car, we had to replace all of that on the paintwork”. 

Fortunately, the creative licence afforded to Embassy for ‘Ultimate Racetrack’ had a direct impact on the quality of the finished product we see on-screen. “What I really like about it is that it doesn’t look like pristine marketing imagery”, says David. “It’s still cool to look at, but there’s a certain visceral realism to it as well”. 

And the project also gave the now-renowned studio a taste of the more viral world of branded content. “It wasn’t ‘traditional’ advertising so to speak, so it was an opportunity to show we could do something new that we really enjoyed”, says Winston. 

Warrior Nun 

There aren’t a lot of TV shows whose fans are so enraptured that, upon their premature cancellation, they crowdfund global campaigns in an attempt to persuade a streaming giant into reversing their decision. Yet that’s precisely what happened with Warrior Nun, even though it didn’t prove enough to convince Netflix to reverse its decision. Those fans will have been elated by recent news regarding the series’ future, and The Embassy’s stellar VFX work had a huge role to play in delivering the cult-like fandom the title now enjoys. 

“The showrunner initially came to us wanting to know just how much of Warrior Nun we could feasibly do for the available budget”, says Winston. “And, as with every project, we started from a place of wanting to solve problems for clients. Because Warrior Nun was not as widely known in the genre world as a property like The Witcher, its budget was a little smaller. We proposed simply taking on the whole show, and through economy of scale, we could guarantee the quality and be efficient with costs."

And that’s precisely what happened. “We approached Netflix with that proposal, and they ended up agreeing and referring to us as their production partner. So that really gave us a strong level of creative control on the project which, again, I think makes a noticeable difference to what comes through in the finished product”. 

As production went on, The Embassy found their skills called upon with a regular cadence. “When you have an eight day-per-episode shooting schedule, there are always going to be certain things that can’t be done in-camera”, says Winston. “As well as the big fight scenes, part of our role was to provide solutions for those instances”. 

Upon its release Warrior Nun struck a chord with the fantasy genre crowd who'd been reared on visuals from Marvel and Star Wars, albeit with a much smaller budget. “Something that makes me really proud about our evolution is how we’ve become a genuine creative partner on a lot of our projects”, says Winston. “And Warrior Nun is a great example of that”. 

And there you have it. Picking out those five projects was no mean feat, of course. Honourable mentions should go to the likes of The Hunger Games, Lost in Space, and Battleship, as well as stand-out spots for brands not limited to VW, Verizon, Disney, and Toyota. 

But there’s been another consistent theme across the past two decades of The Embassy: That the best is always yet to come. And with their work on Paramount’s The Spiderwick Chronicles coming to completion, we won’t need to wait long for the next showcase of The Embassy’s VFX chops.