Tax rebates
for international VFX production

How to get the TRIP?

To get the TRIP, you have to work with a French Production Service Company, (which can be a VFX studio or another French company). The French company will fill the application for your project and submit it to the CNC. Provided you get approval, expenditures are eligible from the day of submission. Provisional qualification is generally given within a month of submission.

How to qualify?

To qualify to the TRIP as a VFX project, your project must :

  • Be a live-action project (feature, short film, series – single or more episodes, VR), with at least 15% of the shots or an average of one and a half shots per minute of the film are digitally processed;
  • Spend at least €250K in eligible expenditures (live-action shoots, as well as post-production expenditures and all VFX-related spend in France are eligible, see the full list below);
  • Pass a cultural test specifically designed for VFX/ animation projects provided you spend more than 50% of the French expenditures on VFX-related works, including post-production (VFX-related works being addition of characters, visual elements or  objects involved in the action, modification of the rendering of a scene or the camera’s point of view).

Should some of these requirements not be fulfilled, your project can still be qualified to the TRIP as a live action project. In that case too, all the VFX expenditures will also be eligible and get 30% tax rebate. The only difference is that the project will have to pass the « live action cultural test » and to shoot at least 5 days (that can also include green screen, motion cap and second unit shoot) in France.

The cultural test for VFX projects

VFX projects have to pass the « VFX/animation cultural test » made of three distinctive parts, that rewards mainly the involvement in the first part of characters that are whether of European origins or of undetermined origin (monsters, non-humanoids or animals meet this requirement).

In the second part, it requires involvement of French and European talents.

The third part looks at the involvement of French companies in the project. The test is therefore easy to pass for any VFX project that is substantially made in France. Marvel’s « Thor », Wong Kar-wai’s « The Grandmaster », David Lynch’s new « Twin Peaks » series or Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming « Blade Runner 2049 » all qualified to the TRIP incentive. The scope of interpretation is wide and it opens the door to a lot of projects.

What about yours?

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