Go behind the scenes with VFX studio RVX. The political thriller mini-series Zero Day, currently streaming on Netflix, tells the story of a former US President (played by Robert De Niro) given the power to investigate a deadly ‘zero-day’ cyberattack. To help craft a number of scenes in Washington, D.C. and other key locations, production visual effects supervisor Douglas Purver and production visual effects producer Leah Orsini brought on Icelandic VFX studio RVX. Zero Day required a fast turnaround time–shot work began in September 2024 and was completed in January 2025–-to deliver 311 VFX shots. One of the first key locales RVX tackled was the exterior of the Capitol building. Plates had actually been filmed at a New York courthouse, with the team then responsible for extending an area of stairs to make it look like the front of the Capitol.  “I believe the stairs they shot at were a concrete structure, whereas the real Capitol building is marble,” outlines RVX visual effects supervisor Ingo Gudmundsson. “It was a lot of bringing the concrete a bit closer to marble and the other way around. We couldn’t do a full retexture of the practical set, but we did a pretty extensive cleanup, especially of the staircase and the columns. We had a really amazing comp team, led by our compositing supervisor Bragi Brynjarsson.” “We also had to do a fairly extensive rejigging of the proportions of the portico, the entrance, which was different to where they had filmed,” continues Gudmundsson. “I think there’s eight columns in the Capitol exterior, but there were 10 on the New York exterior. We squeezed in and shifted things around a little to make it work.”  Another challenge on those Capitol shots was lighting direction. “In some of the shots we were cheating the light direction a little,” says Gudmundsson. “In the plate, the sun was behind the courthouse building. We saw a lot of reflected light from different window panes in the high-rises behind the camera, and we had to cheat that as being light pouring through clouds. We had to figure out a way to light the dome and the rest of the building nicely and then figure out a way for those reflected light pools to look believable.” From RVX’s reel: driving comps formed part of the studio’s VFX work. Also in Washington, D.C., RVX carried out several driving comps that included adjustments to the city, owing to the story point of the area being in lockdown. “We had to remove any visible crowds, tourists milling about, that kind of thing,” notes Gudmundsson. “Sometimes they managed to place a few cop cars and military vehicles in the background, then they would ask us to add blinking lights to those or augment with CG vehicles as well.” Later, for scenes taking place in the U.S. Congress, RVX delivered set extensions and digital crowds. “Even though we knew this was featuring in the last episode, it was something that we needed to start right away,” recalls RVX visual effects producer Jan Guilfoyle. “So the House Chamber environment and associated CG crowd was already underway and going on in the background while we were delivering the early episodes.” RVX was provided with set measurements, scans and reference photography of the Congress set. This included scans of extras that could then be rigged as digi-double assets for a crowd system. “The crowd system we used was Atoms,” notes Guilfoyle. “We shot motion capture here in Iceland, with RVX staff performing the roles of US senators and congresspeople. Crowd TD Valdimar Baldvinsson handled all the House chamber crowd himself. Stavros Theiakos was the lead compositor on the sequence.” A different kind of visual effects approach was required for a moment when we go into the former President’s mind and he is rooting around in his failing memory, when books, desk items and artifacts around him flicker on and off in a timelapse fashion. “It was a very unique challenge on the show,” observes Gudmundsson. “There was a lot of creative interpretation in how to do that. This is purely in his mind; a visualization of his loss of memory.” “It was the one thing that wasn’t grounded in reality,” adds Guilfoyle. “Everything else was, ‘We know what we need to do for this. We need to replicate this real building or do this other thing.’ But this was the one thing that was like, ‘Okay, that will be interesting when that comes in and how that’s going to work?’” RVX received several plates that were at different stages in terms of being full, empty or partially full of props, as well as various lighting turned on and off.  Gudmundsson praises the work of Henrik Linnet, the lead compositor on this memory sequence, who brought all the plates together. “He really picked it up and ran with it. We trusted him to come up with something visually interesting. We picked one hero shot that was our testbed of what the look could be, what the flickers mean, what does it settle into? It was a real creative challenge.” The post Capitol locations: the visual effects of ‘Zero Day’ appeared first on befores & afters.