Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545821
There's 3,200 shots in the series, but there's a lot of invisible VFX. A man crosses a street that was shot in downtown LA. All of the background, you can only dress one or two blocks. Anything beyond two blocks, that's all period cars that we created. That's all demod- ernization. We have to paint away signs. We have to recreate city blocks and make it look like New York. We shot on the backlots a lot, so those set extensions become a little bit easier because you can dress more with the backlot than you could dress practically in downtown LA. Let's jump over to the effects needed for the superpowers: the sand, the pyrokinesis, the electricity. How did you coordi- nate all of that? Brooke Noska: Being able to ground these effects into a human, I think is something that we were able to successfully achieve. It also helps it not be "bam-in-your-face" visual effects. You can connect with those characters on the pain that they're feeling, or the sick- ness, or the overexcitement of power like you do in Dirk [Andrew Lewis Caldwell] when he's like, "I am the greatest!" Which ends up being his demise. I think being able to bring everything back to relatability and or- ganic nature was an asset that we had and that we were able to re- ally lean into instead of just, "What's the craziest thing we can do?" Because anybody can do crazy. If you can do visual effects and have it not be in your face, I feel like that's its own middle-of-the-road tal- ent. Hnedel Maximore: Our showrunner was very clear in the beginning: "We're making a hard-boiled detective noir with some spider ability. So I want the visual effects to feel as grounded as possible. Pull as much inspiration from nature as you can." Hearing that immediately triggered quite a few things for us. We started very early in this proj- ect. I think we were employees number five and seven on the pro- duction team. We helped inform some of the decisions that were being made with designing what had to be prosthetic and what had to be visual effects. There was this great moment starting with Dirk. He's Mega- watt, his power is electricity, and he channels electricity through his body. It needed to feel grounded. I found this great image of a light- ning strike victim and I sent it to our showrunner. When our pros- thetic designer Vincent Van Dyke came on, he also pitched the exact same image, "What if Dirk's electricity patterns resemble someone who was struck by lightning?" That collaboration and us being in sync from having not met each other was a good "aha" moment for this character. Vincent made the practical veins. When Dirk is animated and he's charged, you see the electricity pulsing through — that's visual ef- fects. But most of the time when he's talking and he's calmed down, that's practical makeup. Then going back to Sandman [Flint Marko, played by Jack Hus- ton], we wanted him to feel a lot more grounded. We leaned more into the skin irritation of it. We always knew he was never going to be larger than life, like the Sandman from the Spider-Man movies. It was very clear from our showrunner that because this is a perfor- mance-driven show, we need to protect our actor's performance as much as possible. In an earlier dra of the script there was this no- tion that every time Sandman was in an emotional state, you could see swirling of the sand on his face, and the sand would be irritat- ed. So I pitched this idea of a sand viper, the way it burrows and the way it disturbs and moves the sand around. That was one reference. Then there's an art installation called Cymatic. There's sand on this table, and high-frequency bass is vibrating it. You get these beautiful, interesting patterns from the sand being moved by the audio. When we got into post, we started to make shots with it. There's a scene in Episode 102 where we see Flint — he's emotional watch- ing Cat [Li Jun Li] in the rain. We did the sand swirling thing and we did a version with the audio cue where you get the vibrating sand moving on his face. It looked cool, but it was problematic because it started to distract from his performance. Visual effects needs to be supporting. We don't want it to be distracting. We pulled back on all of those versions. One of our vendors, ILM, pitched the idea of high-speed footage of mold growing, and it tied back to a story point where these guys have been experimented on. They're not having fun with their super- powers, with the exception of Dirk, who is kind of oblivious to what's happening with him. Sandman and Flint and Lonnie [Abraham Popoola] — they're not happy with what's happening with them. They're in pain — this is not a good experience for them. So we're seeing this moldy growth, how their skin reddens and it's irritated and it converts into sand. We had to go through those explorations to land where we ultimately landed, and I think it supports the story a lot better.