Award-winning SFX company recreates rural Scottish farming landscape for Terence Davies’ Sunset Song
Artem SFX, an award-winning physical special effects company, created a range of effects and atmospherics for Terence Davies’ latest film, Sunset Song, an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic novel, starring Agyness Deyn and Peter Mullan.
Working on location around Ballater in the Cairngorms National Park, out of the company’s Glasgow base, Artem created smoke effects and weather effects, including violent rain storms, wind and snow. Artem also carried out a controlled fire on a section of a field to mimic the ancient farming practice of “burning the whins”.
Artem CEO, Mike Kelt, said, “It was a pleasure to work in such a beautiful part of Scotland on this film – we had excellent weather throughout the shoot so it was amusing that our job was to make the weather miserable, providing rain, a storm and some snow, alongside fire effects to burn the hillside”.
Sunset Song, written by Lewis Grassic Gibbon in 1932, is widely regarded as one of the most important Scottish novels of the 20th Century. After its adaptation for television in the 1970s and a theatre production, which toured in 2008, this feature film version of the book was shot in Scotland and abroad in 2014.
This project follows Artem’s involvement in Justin Kurzel’s highly acclaimed Macbeth film, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, creating mist, smoke, rain and fire, as well as gruesome prosthetic wounds and an ultrarealistic full body dummy of one of the film’s central characters. Artem also created the special effects for the remake of the 1949 Whiskey Galore!, starring Eddie Izzard, due to come out next year.
Artem combines the best of engineering expertise with creative flair to provide everything from prosthetics and props to pyrotechnics and animatronics. In 2012 Artem also helped to bring to life the enormous creative and logistical vision of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics and the Paralympics. See more at Artem’s website.
SUNSET SONG IS OUT NOW
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