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www.postmagazine.com 13 POST JULY/AUG 2025 Superman is packed with visual effects. Weta FX served as the lead effects studio on the film, de- livering 600 shots that represent a number of key sequences. One of which is the Kaiju — a monster that starts off small but quickly grows to skyscrap- er height. Lex Luthor releases the Kaiju in down- town Metropolis, hoping to distract Superman from his bigger plan. According to Weta VFX supervisor Guy Williams, the production spent roughly a week shooting drone footage in Cleveland, which would serve as the backdrop of a large battle between the Kaiju and the Justice Gang, who offer their support to Metropolis. The shoot only allowed for coverage of a few city blocks, leaving VFX to create the surrounding area, as well as the top of buildings, which the drone was limited from filming due to flight restrictions. "James (Gunn) and Henry (Braham) are very keen to shoot their whole movie," says Weta FX's Williams. "He's not the kind of director who's just like, 'I'm not going to shoot any of this. We'll do it in post.' He wants to direct the camera, direct the actors. He wants it to be a part of the filmmaking process, with the screen, which is fantastic. Even if we end up replacing something, it's starting from such a strong position." The VFX team would match-move the digital environment so that it replicated the live-action footage, continually iterating the models, textures and shaders. "[You'd be] hard-pressed to tell the difference between the two," says Williams. "Once you have that kind of fidelity...it becomes a sandbox to play in. You can build upon what the live-action unit was able to shoot." For the Kaiju, resolution independence allowed the studio to size up the 300-foot-tall character for shots where only his eye or head are visible. "Since human-sized characters are fighting it, we would often end up really, really, really close to the CG character," Williams explains. "When Hawk Girl lands on its head, we're looking at about one percent of the surface of its head. When she's on the eye, she's only half as tall as his eyeball." Weta was also responsible for creating the Pocket Universe, where Lex Luthor secretly holds his adversaries. "If you've watched a lot of James Gunn's recent projects, especially Guardians of the Galaxy, he loves fractals," Williams explains. "He loves repeat- ing math shapes." Weta referenced the element Bismuth for inspi- ration, which can be melted and then cooled to create purple/blue/gold crystal extrusions. "They're very shiny," he shares. "They're absolutely stunning to look at. So, we based everything we did off the actual Bismuth crystal. We wrote software that would grow the crystals...We would draw some shapes and then we figured out all the character- istics that we needed to mimic. And then we had a piece of software that, if you drew a couple of shapes, it could give you a bunch of crystals." Using SideFX Houdini and their own custom code helped achieve the desired results. The largest sequence that Weta FX executed comes near the end of the film, when Mister Terrific takes on a bunch of soldiers guarding the entrance to the Pocket Universe. The scene has the look of a Middle East desert, but was actually shot on the lake front in Cleveland. The scene spans two-and- a-half minutes and is a combination of choreo- graphed stunts and digital effects. "The stunt team worked with James for a long- time, choreographing all the beats," Williams reveals. "They had it down to this beautiful performance." The scene was broken into three segments that were shot over two days, which helped to accom- modate stunt rigging for multiple characters, as well as resets for multiple takes, but presented challeng- es due to changes in the weather and lighting. "The breakpoints were very considered by the stunt team on how to best shoot it," he recalls. "When we go to put those three scenes back together, it looks like one, long shot. The first part was shot in the morning. The second part was in the afternoon. The next part was the next day, in the morning, and there were less clouds in the sky, so the three scenes feel totally different. For the most part, we were able to deal with a lot of it just by changing the color temperature of the plates, and doing some selective grading and balancing. But the second and third sequence were significantly different." Weta's work also involved digital characters, such as replacing the live-action Superman in select shots to better position his body, which was restricted by a harness. "Even if we were using a digital human to replace a character, we're match-moving with high fidelity the performance that the character gave...Sometimes we replace the whole character because lighting isn't accurate enough, and it's going to look a little bit comp'y if we have a face that's not swinging around in the light like the camera is. But even then, we match move the face so that you can't tell the difference. Our job isn't to second guess an actor's performance. It's to take what they gave and put it into any environment and make it feel fantastical." Framestore Framestore was another major contributor to the film's visual effects, creating 541 shots that made it into the final edit. According to visual effects super- visor Stéphane Nazé, much of the studio's work in- cluded the creation of Krypto, Superman's Fortress of Solitude and its staff of robots, and Lex Luthor's Engineer — a female character that's able to change her body thanks to implanted nanotechnology. Krypto is based on James Gunn's own dog, which is about 60 percent smaller than the super dog and brown in color. Gunn sent the VFX team videos of his dog for inspiration, capturing his energy and motion. Superman audiences find out that Krypto actually belongs to Supergirl, Superman's cousin, and there's a good chance he'll appear in another film in the near future, as Framestore is set to contribute VFX. "We got pictures and we got some clips, some videos — shot with an iPhone — in his house, on the terrace, just showing his dog," Nazé recalls. "How he's acting. How crazy he is. And what you see in the movie, that's what literally he is at home. That's exactly his dog!" The studio didn't have to start from scratch in developing the canine character. It was able to tap into its experience creating Cosmo for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies to develop Krypto's look. "Basically, we knew we'd be on this movie at the end of Guardians because James really enjoyed working with Framestore," shares Nazé. "We did Cosmo, and we developed a lot of things internally. We have proprietary software. We have our own tools for the groom, for the hair, for the rendering and all those things." Krypto began as a base mesh asset, which Framestore then groomed by adding hair. "The very complex part is to get the right base mesh, because when you groom on the top, that will define the length of the fur." He adds that the CG fur's length, motion and texture combine to make the digital character that much more believable. Framestore's Stéphane Nazé Weta created Superman's Kaiju. Krypto is based on James Gunn's dog.