John Adams

Visual Effects

2008 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special (Winner) | 2009 Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie, or Special (Two-time Winner)

Adapted from David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, John Adams is a lavish seven-part miniseries on HBO airing in 2008. The series chronicles U.S. President John Adams’s political life and his role as America’s least understood and most underestimated Founding Father. Adams’ political motivation was that there is a purpose greater than one’s self. The story is both moving for its personal love story between John and Abigail Adams, and impressive in its scope of history and detail. The mini-series covers decades of Adams’ life in both the USA and Europe.

The whole production was one marked by visual excellence and historical authenticity. The 110-day shoot took place from February to May 2007 in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; Richmond, Virginia; and Budapest, Hungary.

To recreate the world at this period, almost every trick was required of the visual effects team from set extensions, virtual environments and 3D crowds to matte paintings and fluid dynamic sea simulations. Working from old maps and paintings, as well as reference materials from their own historical research, Boston was recreated of the 1770’s and the blockade of British ships across Boston Harbor.