DNEG

DNEG (originally Double Negative) was founded in London in 1998 by a small team led by Peter Chiang, Paul Franklin and Alex Hope as a boutique compositing house. The company expanded steadily through the 2000s, opened its Singapore facility in 2007 and its Vancouver studio in 2014, then went through a series of acquisitions that brought in feature animation (DNEG Animation), episodic episodic VFX (DNEG TV), and a large India-based pipeline now headquartered in Mumbai.

The studio's reputation rests on technical density. Christopher Nolan's photoreal black holes for Interstellar were rendered through DNEG-built tooling; the synthetic Los Angeles cityscapes of Blade Runner 2049 and the Arrakis vistas of Dune use the same pipeline at scale. DNEG has won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects on Inception, Interstellar, Ex Machina, Blade Runner 2049, First Man, Tenet, and Dune — more wins per decade than any other vendor.

The company is now publicly listed in India through its 2024 reverse merger with Prime Focus and operates with around 9,000 staff across nine cities. DNEG also runs an in-house animation division based primarily in London and Mumbai (Nimona, Garfield).