E4

Set in the mid 1990’s, My Mad Fat Diary follows the story of a 16-year-old, 16-stone girl, Rae.  Rae has a lust for love and life yet struggles with mental health and body image issues.  Having recently been released from four months in a psychiatric hospital, Rae wants to find love but fears that, at 16 stone, she is too big for the world.

She begins to reconnect with her best friend, Chloe, who is unaware of Rae’s problems, believing was in France for the past months.  Rae attempts to keep this information from her, whilst also trying to impress Chloe’s friends Archie, Izzy and Chop.

Our VFX artists reunited with ‘My Mad Fat Diary’ for its third and final season, with a brief for yet more surprising images.  Unforgettably, the team used Maya and Nuke to explode series lead Sharon Rooney into a colour cloud of glittering…’thingies’.  The effect was conceived after the shoot, so the Space team had to work a little harder in repurposing filmed performances to make something coherent, but with great comic timing.

We also put together the tear-jerking finale, which gathered the entire cast on a train carriage.  Because getting everyone on the same set on the same day proved tricky, the scene was mostly assembled using green screen to place the cast individually, or in pairs, into plates filmed on a real train.

Space created VFX shots across 10 x 60-minute episodes including:

• Exploding cast
• Car crash
• Infinite exam hall
• Cosmetics
• Hallucinations
• CGI fire
• Cast replication
• Green screen
• Continuity fixes
• and CGI penis confetti… don’t ask!