Vine FX put out its VFX breakdown reel for Enola Holmes 3 this week, covering the 150 shots it delivered for the film — one of four vendors on the project alongside Untold Studios, beloFX and Company 3. The reel leads, reasonably, with the flashy stuff: sequences where Enola’s thought process gets visualized on screen, letters and symbols lifting off a page and reassembling in mid-air as she works through a coded message. That’s the part every trade write-up is going to lead with too.
The shot I keep thinking about is quieter. Enola finds a coded message hidden in the smudge marks left on a mirror — and those smudges were built from real fingerprint references, layered so they stay legible as Morse code up close while still reading as an ordinary dirty mirror at a normal viewing distance. That’s a much harder authoring problem than it sounds, and it’s one I’ve run into from a completely different direction.
Two things at once is the whole job
Any texture or prop detail on a production has to survive two different readings at once: the glance and the close-up. A dirty window, a scuffed wall, a fingerprint-smeared mirror — in the wide shot it just needs to sell “this surface has been touched.” That’s the easy 90% of the work, and it’s mostly noise: grime dictionaries, smear brushes, a bit of directional smudging so it reads as motion rather than a stamp.
What Vine FX had to do is the hard 10%: make that same surface hold up under a hero close-up where the specific pattern of the dirt is the plot. The smudges can’t just look like fingerprints in general — they have to resolve, on inspection, into dot-dash groupings a character can actually translate on screen. That means the detail has to be authored with a code underneath it, not scattered procedurally and hoped into legibility. You can fake general grime with noise. You cannot fake a message.
I’ve hit a smaller version of this on prop and set-dressing work: a label, a gauge, a scratched serial number that needs to read as real texture from ten feet and as actual information from two feet. The instinct that fixes it is always the same — stop treating the detail as decoration applied on top of the surface, and start treating the surface as the thing that carries the information, with the “worn” pass built to preserve legibility rather than obscure it. Real fingerprint references get you photographic believability. Placing them so the code still reads is the actual craft.
The other half of the reel is deliberately boring
The rest of Vine FX’s work on the film is the kind of VFX that’s designed to be invisible: window replacements and bluescreen composites, including the view outside Sherlock Holmes’ office in a Victorian London that no longer exists to shoot on location. That’s set-extension work in the most literal sense — matching period lighting, period glazing, period atmosphere, well enough that nobody watching the finished film registers it as an effect at all.
The set piece that bridges the “invisible” work and the showier work is a mine explosion. Production shot a practical blast on set, and Vine FX used LiDAR scans of the set to build a digital version they could blow apart at a scale the practical explosion couldn’t safely reach — matching the live-action plate for lighting and material, then taking the destruction further than pyrotechnics alone would allow. Scanning the set before you break it, so the digital double you build afterward matches down to the specific geometry that was actually standing there, is the same logic as the fingerprint smudges: the fake only works because it’s built from a real reference of the specific thing, not a generic stand-in for the category of thing.
Enola Holmes 3 is directed by Philip Barantini — taking over from Harry Bradbeer, who directed the first two films — and released on Netflix on 1 July 2026. Vine FX’s team was led by VFX supervisor Ben Hicks and CG supervisor Tim Kilgour, working under production VFX supervisor Mike Ellis.
Sourced from Vine FX’s own VFX breakdown reel and reporting on it from Televisual, The Art of VFX and UK Screen Alliance, plus release and credit details from Deadline, Variety and Netflix. The cover art on this page is an original graphic made for this piece, not a production still.