The critics have not been kind to Ridley Scott's film Exodus, but none deny the visual effects.
Once Moses leads the Jews away from Egypt and out of slavery, the spectacle begins in full force. There are plagues of locusts, frogs, and flies. Thousands of people. Crocodiles. Dramatic chariot races on the edges of cliffs. And, of course, the parting of the Red Sea. In the past, biblical epics relied on sets and thousands of extras. For this film, Scott relied on crews of thousands who created the cinematic illusions with computer graphics.
Peter Chiang from Double Negative (DNeg) was overall supervisor, managing the work at DNeg, The Moving Picture Company (MPC), Method, Lola, Pearless, and Scanline.
MPC had worked with Ridley on Prometheus, so it tackled the toughest shots, finishing the work from when the Hebrews are released until the finale, Chiang says. They also used their Alice software to create the battle. DNeg handled the plagues and the Egyptian landscape. Lola did the landslide. Pearless did greenscreen set extensions of live-action sets. Method did a lot of skies and some one-off shots. And, Scanline helped MPC with the water simulations at the end, since MPC uses their Flowline software.
DNeg and the Plagues
For the plagues, Scott wanted each to seem plausible in nature, yet dramatic.
He wanted the plagues amped up to 11, Chiang says. But, if you look at YouTube footage of locusts, it's quite underwhelming, so we multiplied the particles and amount that DNeg was doing. And frogs surged like a football crowd through a narrow gap. We had to create that dimension so when seen from a height, they wouldn't look like a flat carpet layer.
Some of the frogs were real. When asked how many frogs they'd need to film, Chiang requested 400.
I just picked a number, and lo and behold there were 400 frogs on set, Chiang says. They came in a bucket. After every take, we had to pick them all up and count them. Ridley, Dariusz Wolski the DP, the set dressers, the animal wranglers. We all joined in. The frogs went everywhere. It was harder picking them up than filming them. I'm glad I didn't ask for 1,000.
During another plague, this one with flies, Scott wanted great vistas of Egypt seen through a wide-angle lens.
In true scale, you wouldn't see the flies because the depth of field put them so far away, Chiang says. So we had some [CG flies] bouncing on the camera lens, and to make others read, they ended up the size of rabbits. You don't notice the cheats as the images flow from one cut to the next. But, if you would look at the 3D scene closely, you'd see that it's full of cheats, speed changes, and sizes.
Of all the plagues, Chiang found the crocodiles most difficult.
All that water, he says. We shot the film in native stereo, so we couldn't do any 2D cheats. We had to respect the Zed space. So those shots are mostly digital. The flow of the Nile and the water interaction with the crocs is all CG. The odd splashes on the people are real, though. Special effects made a boat that could sink with a gimbal that we shot against a bluescreen. To create those shots, the crew at DNeg used a fluid system based on Side Effects' Houdini.
MPC: Crowds and Water
For its part, MPC artists in Montreal handled the Battle of Kadesh sequence by extending environments filmed in Jordan's Wadi Rum mountains and adding digital crowds of soldiers to create the Battle of Kadesh.
These are the same mountains Ridley used for Prometheus, says Max Wood, CG supervisor at MPC. So that was great for us. We had photogrammetry of the mountains already and lots of reference.
MPC's London-based crew moved the crowds through deserts, mountains, and to the beach through an additional nine sequences, and created the Red Sea.
Although the water shots represented the bulk of the difficult work at MPC, crowd shots dominated the work as a whole.
Our biggest crowd had 200,000 agents, Wood says. We hoped we would break our record of 250,000 agents in World War Z, but we didn't get a plate that was wide enough.
Alice, MPC's proprietary system, managed the crowds, whether birds, animals, or people.
We had a lot of birds, tens of thousands of birds, Wood says, seagulls mostly flying around. We thought we could use elements, but there were so many, we did them all in CG. And, this was the first time we had crowds of horses and chariots.
To derive performance data from the horses and chariots, MPC worked with Audiomotion Studios in Wheatley, UK. MPC provided the CG skeletons; Audiomotion handled the motion capture at an equestrian center near London.
We had two horses pulling a chariot with two people in back, Wood explains. We had special suits built for the horses. Audiomotion captured everything - the wheels turning and other elements on the chariots. We had captured horses for other films before, but never two running with chariots. There was a gap of only eight to 12 inches between the horses, so there was a lot of shadowing, but Audiomotion did a great job. They cleaned up the data and sent us clips quickly.
Motion cycles included data for straight passes, left turns, right turns, acceleration, and shots of riders pulling on the reins.
We blended those set pieces together in Alice, Wood says. The difficulty was that horses are left- and right-footed, so we had to make sure the blends had the two horses running with the same stride.
During one sequence, a cliff collapses, sending riders and chariots down the side of a mountain. The filmmakers shot the sequence on an abandoned roadway carved through mountains in the Canary Islands. MPC artists extended the mountains, collapsed the cliff, and added the animated digital soldiers, horses, and chariots. Kali, MPC's proprietary rigid- and soft-body solve
Most recent headlines
09/11/2025
Dalet today announced a transformative leap forward for media operations: Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) that unifies the Dalet ecosystem under one natura...
20/10/2025
Inside TAMS: How Time-Addressable Media Stores could redefine sports workflows By Paul Markham
Friday, October 17, 2025 - 08:57
Print This Story
A penalty...
20/10/2025
Transformational production: Inside TVN's remote production push for the DFL...
20/10/2025
How NBC Sports Transitioned Stamford Facility to One Format: 1080p HDRMulti-year plan harmonizes workflows, simplifies operationsBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial ...
20/10/2025
NBA on NBC' Studio Production Team Is Ready for Tip-Off With Coast-to-Coast...
20/10/2025
Under pressure: TVN CEO Markus Osthaus considers the German sports broadcasting ...
20/10/2025
(L-R) Maria Dizzia, Carmen Emmi, and Russell Tovey attend the Plainclothes pre...
20/10/2025
In March, we launched Concerts Near You to help listeners find concerts from their favorite artists. Since then, more than 3 million people have used it to disc...
20/10/2025
Em diversas cidades do Brasil, um movimento tem se fortalecido para celebrar o poder, a beleza e a profundidade da criatividade negra. O Dia AMPLIFIKA, agora em...
20/10/2025
In cities across Brazil, a movement is growing that celebrates the power, beauty, and depth of Black creativity. AMPLIFIKA Day, now in its fifth edition, return...
20/10/2025
Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft rendering...
20/10/2025
DENVER and MUNICH Imagine Communications today announced its plans to acquire Pixel Power Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Rohde & Schwarz. Financial terms of...
20/10/2025
LOS ANGELES G Morgan has joined Globecast, a provider of broadcast, media and entertainment managed services, as executive vice president of sales, Globecast Am...
20/10/2025
PLYMOUTH, Wisc. Heartland Video Systems and Zixi have partnered to enable broadcast-quality live video delivery over any IP network....
20/10/2025
A. R. Rahman on Facing Fear and Finding the Divine In an interview with Berklee President Jim Lucchese, the Oscar-winning composer reflects on how courage and...
20/10/2025
Monday 20 October 2025
To view this content, please enable our use of cookies. ...
20/10/2025
Rohde & Schwarz transfers Pixel Power to Imagine Communications Companies work collaboratively to ensure continuity and ongoing support for existing customers...
20/10/2025
RT 's Prime Time is set to host the final Presidential Election Debate this Tuesday night, October 21, providing an opportunity to hear directly from Irelan...
20/10/2025
NVIDIA and Google Cloud are expanding access to accelerated computing to transform the full spectrum of enterprise workloads, from visual computing to agentic a...
19/10/2025
Back to All News
Sins of Kujo' Comes to Life in New Live-Action Series Set for Spring 2026
Entertainment
19 October 2025
GlobalJapan
Link copied to cl...
18/10/2025
New England Sports Network (NESN) has chosen Harmonic, working with Astound Business Solutions, as its enterprise technology partner to transform primary distri...
18/10/2025
NEW ORLEANS, La. In the run-up to the start of the NBA season, WVUE-TV and Gray Local Media have announced a deal with DirecTV that will greatly expand access t...
18/10/2025
Berklee Celebrates 40 Years of the Fall Together Concert Faculty composers Bob Pilkington and Greg Hopkins are among the featured artists for this year's ...
17/10/2025
NEP Group Receives New Equity Investment From 26North Partners LP, Co-InvestorsCarlyle remains the largest shareholder as the company prepares for the futureBy ...
17/10/2025
Apple Lands Five-Year Deal for F1 Distribution in the U.S.Besides airing on Apple TV, the sport will be amplified on other Apple servicesBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Ed...
17/10/2025
SVG Sit-Down: Marshall Electronics' Bernie Keach on the Future of PTZ Camera...
17/10/2025
L2 Productions' REMI Facility in Austin Can Produce Content From AnywhereMusic festivals, sports events are produced via flypacks and remote control roomsBy...
17/10/2025
By Lucy Spicer
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival...
17/10/2025
(L-R) Christopher Meyer, Addison Timlin, Cooper Raiff, Lili Reinhart, Alyah Chan...
17/10/2025
M sica e arte se uniram em uma noite especial na semana passada na ZIV Gallery, ...
17/10/2025
Music and art came together for one special night last week at ZIV Gallery, an i...
17/10/2025
Spotify and FC Barcelona are extending our partnership through 2030, continuing a collaboration that's redefining how fans, players, and artists connect. Th...
17/10/2025
MURRIETA, Calif. The Sports Fishing Championship (SFC) has deployed DigitalGlue's creative.space storage platform to streamline video production by centrali...
17/10/2025
BELLEVUE, Wash. Football continued to cement its reputation as a bulwark of TV advertising in Q3 2025 with new data from iSpot that showed both the NFL and coll...
17/10/2025
The Sports Fishing Championship (SFC), the premier competitive saltwater fishing series, has transformed its production workflow by adopting creative.space, the...
17/10/2025
QuickLink, a leading provider of award-winning multi-camera video productions and remote contribution solutions, announces the release of StudioPro Version 4, ...
17/10/2025
Although the annual Grammy Awards celebration is best known for recognizing achievements in the recording industry, the show often proves a visual spectacle as ...
17/10/2025
OpenDrives, Inc., a leading provider of software-defined data storage and data services, has promoted Alex Dunfey to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from his for...
17/10/2025
The University of Arizona (UofA) has significantly upgraded its broadcast communication infrastructure with the integration of Riedel Communications' advanc...
17/10/2025
Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) today announced that New England Sports Network (NESN), owned by Fenway Sports Group and Delaware North, has selected Harmonic as its en...
17/10/2025
Austin PBS has recently upgraded its facility-wide communications infrastructure, deploying Clear-Com 's Eclipse HX, FreeSpeak II beltpacks, and V-Series ...
17/10/2025
ZEISS announces an open call for the closed BETA testing phase of CinCraft Virtual Lens Technology, the innovative digital tool that brings authentic lens chara...
17/10/2025
Situated in the town of Kokkola, Centria University of Applied Sciences offers higher education across five core fields: engineering, business, social and healt...
17/10/2025
Public information channel in Georgia, USA, to implement a powerful, simple, and cost-effective playout automation platform.
Pebble, the leading automation, co...
17/10/2025
HBO Max is reporting that it has launched in 15 new markets, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Macau, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Ukraine, boosting the streaming serv...
17/10/2025
Netflix said it will make a major push into video podcasts, inking a wide-ranging deal with Spotify through which it will offer 16 podcasts in the U.S. starting...
17/10/2025
Lexington, Ky. As part of a push to highlight its advanced advertising capabilities, Viamedia has launched a new AI-powered ad tech platform and officially rebr...
17/10/2025
NEW YORK QuickLink has announced the release of StudioPro Version 4, which the company is calling the most significant upgrade yet to its flagship video product...
17/10/2025
NEW YORK and CUPERTINO, Calif. Apple and NBCUniversal said they will sell Apple TV and Peacock streaming bundles to U.S. subscribers starting Oct. 20....
The critics have not been kind to Ridley Scott's film Exodus, but none deny the visual effects. 
