G20
Released 10th April 2025 on Prime Video, feature-length thriller G20 takes place at the G20 summit in Cape Town, South Africa. As terrorists take over, US President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) must use her governing and military experience to defend her family and evade capture, outsmarting the enemy, defending her country and safeguarding world leaders in this action-packed thrill ride.
Cinesite delivered 220 visual effects shots, overseen by Alessandro Cioffi, VFX supervisor from our partner studio TRIXTER. Production VFX supervision was provided by Sean Farrow and the film was directed by Patricia Riggen.
Most notably, Cinesite created the eponymous G20 summit location, a hotel on top of a real location – Signal Hill overlooking Sea Point Bay in Cape Town. The topography of the hill was adapted and an extensive digital building added on top. The digital hotel was built as a vastly extended version of a wellness and retreat complex, located 60 km away from Cape Town, where most of the Summit sequences were shot, using only its basic layout as a footprint before modelling additional floors and story point fictional location extensions like the ballroom, the sat-tower, the helipad and more.
The entire Signal Hill, including its iconic south end Lion’s Head, has been digitally rebuilt by Cinesite and considerably reshaped to facilitate the storytelling.
The surrounding Cape Town cityscape, with the distant Devil’s Peak and Table Mountain, was also built, combining plates and reprojection techniques, as part of a 360-degree digital panorama. Several aerial shots throughout the film establish the Summit’s location, so a coherent, realistic sense of the area’s geography needed to be maintained.
On the cliff edge at Signal Hill’s highest point, a helipad was added to the hotel, where the action at the exciting climax of the film takes place. The initial plan had been to capture this sequence primarily in camera, adding propellers and tail blades digitally to a physical prop helicopter, but ultimately for many shots the aircraft was recreated entirely digitally and its animation completely redesigned, in addition to the surrounding environments beyond the helipad set.
Other visual effects sequences created by Cinesite involve a thrilling gun battle on top of a lift and also in its confined interior, as well as a spectacular crash involving The Beast, the president’s armoured car. Having been hit by multiple rockets from a rocket launcher, the vehicle somersaults through the air amid a huge explosion. Working at 4K resolution, with camera views close to the points of impact, realistic fire, smoke and atmospherics were added with accurate dynamics and careful attention by the compositing team.
G20 is playing now on Prime Video.
