Scandal

Scandal is an American political thriller television series created by Shonda Rhimes, which aired on ABC from 2012 to 2018 across seven seasons. It stars Kerry Washington as Washington crisis-management expert Olivia Pope, with Tony Goldwyn, Bellamy Young and Jeff Perry, and was produced by ABC Studios. A former White House communications director turned fixer, Pope runs a firm that buries the capital’s secrets while entangled with the president who once employed her.

Network thrillers of this kind spend their effects budget on the unglamorous work that keeps a weekly schedule looking expensive. Practically, that means digital matte work and set extension to put the Capitol, the White House and the Washington skyline outside windows filled by a Los Angeles soundstage, screen graphics and phone comps built to be legible at broadcast speed, muzzle flashes and blood elements for the show’s abrupt bursts of violence, plus weather, season and continuity cleanup across a punishing episode count — rotoscoping and compositing carrying most of the load. Terminal FX supplied visual effects and animation on Scandal, part of its film, television and commercial portfolio.