Fire Country is about a group of young convicts who seek redemption and sign up for a prison program to fight Northern California fires.

The show is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer TV for CBS Studios.

“Fire is the antagonist of the show and it’s all about realism. We wanted to produce a feature film look.” said VFX Supervisor Colin Strause.

“Each kind of fire, whether it’s a little brush fire or a huge forest blaze, has its own library of footage. Elements from those shots are extracted and further combined with computer-generated fire, smoke and embers.”

Making “fire”, involved Houdini software from SideFX with latest graphic cards and some CBS-VFX proprietary processes. Only a few years ago, what we’re doing would have taken days or even weeks, but now we’re able to do massive shots in a couple of hours – sometimes even overnight.” explains Strause.

And adding to those challenges, the bulk of the action visuals were frenetic handheld shots of the firefighters battling the flames that put the audience into the middle of the dangers. CBS-VFX had to seamlessly match each camera jitter.

Working with the filmmakers, we would sketch concepts/placements of flames onto still photographs
to highten the drama or the action