Sheron Residence Full production

The project started with a request from the Sheron Residence team in Uzbekistan. They found Coper online and were looking not just for a production company, but for a team with strong post-production expertise, because a large part of the future film had to be created after the shoot.

For Coper, this was the first project where we acted as the lead production company and were directly responsible to the client for creative, pre-production, the shoot and the post-production that followed.

In parallel, the client was negotiating with Mads Mikkelsen and his agents. The actor’s side approved the treatment, the crew and the production portfolio. Once we had the final confirmation, we began preparing the shoot in Tashkent.

The core Coper team flew in from Kazakhstan. In Uzbekistan our production partner was Shoom Production, who helped with locations, equipment, lighting, the art department, the local crew, transport and running the shoot.

The task was to show Sheron Residence — a development of about 40 hectares with more than 200 Italian-style houses. At the time of the shoot, the residence itself had not yet been built.

So already in pre-production we started assembling the future scenes: choosing angles, camera positions, light direction and how the actor would interact with architecture that didn’t exist yet.

On set we kept everything Mads interacted with directly practical. If he walked on tiles, the tiles were real. If he touched a railing, we physically built the railing. Everything beyond them continued in CG.

This kept real contact, shadows and the actor’s interaction with his surroundings, and let us blend practical elements with CG naturally.

In one scene we wanted to show that time stops meaning what it usually does for the hero. Within a few of Mads’s steps, the world around him turns from day to night.

The transition had to happen not only in the CG background but on the actor himself. So on set we built dynamic lighting that gradually shifted from warm to cool while changing the position and character of the shadows.

Shadows from the future columns and architectural elements were partly created during the shoot, then extended and refined in post-production.

In the pool scene, Mads’s face needed the characteristic moving reflections of water — caustics.

Instead of creating the effect entirely in CG, we built a small practical rig on set with water and a reflective surface and captured real moving highlights directly on the actor.

The pool, the architecture and the surroundings were added later, but the way the light played on the actor stayed real.

Most scenes were shot on a green screen stage, even though in the final film the action takes place outdoors and inside the future grounds of Sheron Residence.

For every shot we defined the time of day, the direction of the virtual sun and the main light sources in advance.

That way, already on set, we matched the color temperature, direction and intensity of the light to the environment that would only appear in the frame in post-production.

For one scene we wanted a shot in which Mads’s giant hand touches the surface of a desert.

We first tested the scene with a double, but the hand looked noticeably different in shape and texture. So the final footage was shot with Mads himself.

The contact between hand and sand was practical: real finger movement, real sand and real contact shadows. In post-production we changed the scale of the scene and built the desert landscape around it.

The interior scenes followed the same principle. Everything the actor physically interacted with, we tried to build on set.

For example, when Mads tossed his jacket onto the bed, the bed was real. For the scene with an opening window, we made a metal frame the actor could physically open.

The movement of that frame was then tracked, and in post-production the final windows, architecture and surroundings were added on top of it.

For us, this project was a natural continuation of what Coper has always done in post-production: knowing in advance how the final frame will be assembled, and building the shoot around that.

With Sheron Residence, that approach extended to the entire production — from the treatment and set preparation to lighting, practical set pieces, the shoot with Mads Mikkelsen and the final assembly of the CG environment.

The result is a project where the shoot and post-production worked as a single process from the start, not as two separate stages.