Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, the latest movie from British filmmaker Guy Ritchie, is now playing in Czech cinemas, and a local post-production team was responsible for its effects. A team of more than 100 artists and technicians led by Prague-based studio MagicLab oversaw the movie’s complex VFX and helped put the finishing touches on the Jason Statham action-adventure.
Ritchie has grown accustomed to working with the Czech company: prior to Operation Fortune, MagicLab had handled the post-production visual effects for the director’s previous three projects, Wrath of Man, The Gentlemen, and Aladdin.
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre was primarily filmed on location in Antalya, Turkey, and the globetrotting adventure takes a cast including Aubrey Plaza, Josh Harnett, and Hugh Grant from Burbank to London to Doha.
While no scenes for the movie were shot in Prague, it was a Czech team that handled most of the visual effects. VFX producers, graphic artists, production coordinators, and supervisors from MagicLab worked on Operation Fortune for the better part of a year.
“We supervised the entire project in terms of visual effects, i.e. we oversaw all creative and technical aspects of digital effects production,” MagicLab executive director Michal Křeček told the Czech Film Commission last year.
“It was possible to establish cooperation across multiple Czech post-production companies. The project had a huge volume [of visual effects], it involved more than 900 trick shots.”
Along with MagicLab, Czech post-production studios PFX, RUR, and Dazzle Pictures also worked on Operation Fortune’s VFX, and participated in the movie from filming in Antalya to post-production in Prague.
In addition to working with director Guy Ritchie, MagicLab has also worked on major Czech productions including Charlatan, Masaryk (A Prominent Patient), the Garden Store trilogy, and this year’s Oscar submission, Il Boemo.
Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre was originally scheduled to open in January of last year, but a series of delays has led it to open in multiple non-U.S. markets while an official release in the states is still up in the air following complications with distributor STX Entertainment.
The delays and January release might suggest that Operation Fortune has issues, but that isn’t the case: read our review of the first-rate, slam-bang action movie here.
