Cold Storage Comes to Canal+ in France, Showcasing The Mill’s Full-Spectrum VFX Craft

Directed by Jonny Campbell and written by David Koepp, based on his 2019 novel, the sci-fi horror-comedy stars Joe Keery, Georgina Campbell and Liam Neeson. At the centre of the story is a highly contagious, mutating fungus that escapes from a sealed military facility and turns an ordinary self-storage centre into the setting for a race against extinction.

For The Mill’s Film & Series teams, Cold Storage was an ambitious production that brought together the full breadth of the studio’s visual effects and image post-production capabilities.

A truly global VFX collaboration

Formerly MPC Paris, The Mill was entrusted with the film’s full visual pipeline, from visual effects through to image post-production. Across an 18-month production period, 431 artists contributed to 541 VFX shots, with teams collaborating across the global MPC/The Mill network.

The scope of the work spanned an exceptionally broad range of disciplines: invisible clean-up and digital enhancement, set extensions, fully CG environments, creature work, macroscopic simulations, explosions and large-scale destruction. The production also involved highly detailed digital enhancements to SFX makeup, requiring close collaboration between departments to ensure that practical and digital work remained seamlessly integrated.

Making the Fungus the star

One of the film’s greatest creative challenges was its central threat: the mysterious Fungus. Rather than treating the organism simply as an effect, the team approached it as a character in its own right. Extensive organic research informed its development, with the aim of creating something that felt biologically credible and genuinely threatening, while avoiding recognisable or overly familiar features.

Texture, colour and animation became key to establishing its visual identity. The challenge was not only to make the Fungus convincing at microscopic scale, but also to ensure that its presence remained readable as the contamination expanded into larger-scale sequences.

“The Fungus is the real star of the film,” says Co-VFX Supervisor Bastien Chauvet. “Everything relied on animation and visuals to give it a distinct personality, without ever becoming too over-the-top.”

That balance between biological realism and cinematic character became a defining element of the VFX work.

A complete VFX and image post-production pipeline

The work on Cold Storage extended beyond VFX. The Mill’s Paris-based teams also handled the film’s full image post-production, including a substantial volume of conforms and multiple grading sessions, through to final theatrical and video deliveries, including Dolby Vision masters.

Bringing VFX and image post together within an integrated workflow helped streamline exchanges between editorial and colour management, while maintaining consistency across the film’s many complex visual effects sequences. This end-to-end approach was particularly valuable on a project where invisible post work, CG environments, creature animation, digital effects and large-scale destruction all needed to sit seamlessly within the same photographic world.

Bringing Cold Storage to life

The result is a film whose visual effects range from deliberately subtle interventions to some of its most spectacular moments, all serving a story that combines science-fiction, horror, action and comedy.

For The Mill, Cold Storage represents the scale and versatility of its Film & Series teams: 541 VFX shots, 431 artists and 18 months of international collaboration, supported by an integrated VFX and image post-production pipeline.

As Cold Storage arrives on Canal+ in France, audiences can now experience the finished film on television, and see the work of the many artists and technical teams who helped transform an unseen biological threat into the film’s most memorable character!

Watch Cold Storage on Canal+ in France on Saturday 22 August 2026 at 9:10pm.

Explore the full project and credits on our Cold Storage project page.