Gary Shore's Dracula Untold isn't your typical vampire story. There was a determination to do something different right from the start - beginning in a pre-production office coated in a what-not-to-do wallpaper of every vampire from every movie ever.
The film is the story of Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad the Impaler, or Dracula. The untold story how a man with a famous name prevented another, Mehmed the Conqueror, from living up to his own.
Framestore's Christian Manz was the overall VFX supervisor on the show, with Glen Pratt in Framestore's London studio and Ivan Moran in Montreal supervising 710 of its 740 total shots. Manz got involved early on, while working on another Universal project. I got a phone call from the studio while I was in the final few months of 47 Ronin, he explains, so with Framestore's art department, I started preparing a package of mood-boards based on the script before we met Gary Shore when he came to visit us in our London office with the film's producers.
Shore was keen to avoid the well-trodden gothic vampire story and instead ground it in the history of the man Bram Stoker took as inspiration for Dracula. That historical backdrop meant a new challenge for Framestore - armies fighting huge battles - and some beautiful scenery and towering castles for them to be staged in. Grounded in history it might be, but the film still soars into supernatural territory - giant hand-like swarms of bats that can sweep soldiers aside, human-to-bat transmutations, echolocation vision and some truly gruesome deaths in a litany of highly varied challenges.
Many of those challenges required fully CG shots, with Framestore creating the environment and the action staged within it. There isn't a live-action bat in the movie, and some of the locations and battles weren't shot either. We were shooting in a set of warehouses in Belfast, so when you see this expansive army in the final images, you kind of forget. One of the biggest challenges of the show was that there's hardly anything that's the same throughout and so we needed to take a lot of different effects to an extremely high level for only a handful of shots each. That huge variety meant there was a lot of design involved.
The construction of an environment - from bluescreen and photographic plates to the final shot
Designing a vampire
That design work included developing a unique vampire. The process began at the visual development stage during which Framestores Art Department worked for months to come up with an original design for Vlad. Myriad designs were considered before finally landing on the transparent flesh that ended up in the film.
We didn't want Luke to sit there with just pointy teeth and pale skin. The idea was that there's an inner creature under his skin, says CG Supervisor Ben Lambert. Whenever he is feeding or angry, or when he's being hit by sun, the human pigment disappears and it's revealed, whether through anger or contact with sunlight.
No practical make-up was used for Vlad's transformation, with all stages of his vamping out' done with visual effects. The opaque white subsurface underneath his skin was designed to resemble an advanced human skull rather than something too monstrous, with intricate channels for blood to flow from the teeth. The final look was conveyed through shaders and look dev on top of the plate photography of Vlad. At his most vampiric, with his human-self stripped away by sunlight, Vlad is completely computer generated, with Luke Evans' performance body tracked meticulously and used to inspire the animation. His armor was re-created in CG too to allow the effects of sunlight to take its toll across his whole body.
Going to war
The movie gave Framestore a chance to get its hands on some types of work its film team aren't known for, particularly battles. We hadn't done crowds for a while, so there was a nice blank canvas element to it, says Lambert. We knew the final output would have to feed into fMob, our proprietary crowd tool, and be rendered in Arnold, but the front end of actually making the crowds was open. It was fun to be able to evaluate different crowd software and start staging shots.
Having worked with it already on commercials, the crew decided to use Golaem. In terms of film use it's in its infancy but what's great about it is they were really open to suggestions and we had a really close relationship with them throughout the show. Many of the features we're now seeing in the latest version have come as a result of our crowd team requesting them.
With that software support and the ease of use that comes from the software being embedded inside Maya, artists could be trained up very quickly. The R&D team integrated it into the interface of fMob and artists from different disciplines such as layouts, environments and animation could learn it and be running shots within a week or two.
The larger scale shots with crowd behavior changes that Montreal did really pushed Golaem's functionality at the time, so it's great to have helped improve it and it's a good base for us to build upon in the future. It was a fun process and once we saw the first crowd renders of them all marching, with the flags and their armor glistening in the sun, it was really encouraging to see the route we took worked, says Lambert.
An army of soldiers, created with digital techniques.
Castle Dracula
One of those big battles takes place on the doorstep of Castle Dracula, which was an entirely digital construction. Universal gave us rough concept model that we used as a starting point to work up into the different elements we needed, explains Montreal CG Supervisor JP Li. This included adding detail for the Great Hall, building the portcullis and corridor, adding
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Gary Shore's Dracula Untold isn't your typical vampire story. There was a determination to do something different right from the start - beginning in a pre-production office coated in a what-not-to-do wallpaper of every vampire from every movie ever. 
