How ‘Andor,’ ‘The Boys,’ ‘She-Hulk’ and ‘Star Trek: Picard’ VFX Teams Created Far-Off Worlds and Beastly Superheroes

The Boys (Prime)

VFX supervisor Stephan Fleet found this to be among the most complex shots of the season, saying, “We were tasked with making a photoreal creature that made contact with, and was eaten by, a person. CG-to-human-skin contact is very difficult.” Timothy the octopus is fully CG. “Most challenging, in this case, was getting a creature to look photoreal in a close-up,” he explains. “At first we tended to go more over the top with his performance and kept dialing it back to make him feel more real.” The team also shot actor Chace Crawford’s face with some wires pulling on his cheeks while he ate vegan gelatin that had been shaped into octopus tentacles. “He also had a special ‘ink sack’ in his mouth he could pop to have black goop run down his face,” says Fleet.

Andor (Lucasfilm/Disney+)

“What was really important for us is that locations and environments feel plausible [and] realistic,” says VFX supervisor Mohen Leo, of Industrial Light & Magic. “Even when we knew that what we would ultimately create would be 70 to 80 percent of the frame replaced or augmented with computer graphics, it was important for us to go to real locations and be able to have the director and the cinematographer shoot something where they felt confident that this is the composition, the feel and the weight of the architecture, the feel of the light, and that we could then build a much more fantastic shot around that.” The live-action portion of this shot was filmed with extras at the McLaren Building in the U.K., and everything outside the windows was replaced digitally.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (Marvel/Disney+)

When actress Tatiana Maslany transforms into Marvel Comics’ She-Hulk, the title character of the miniseries is fully CG. This involved face and body capture on set and, according to Weta FX’s senior VFX supervisor Guy Williams, “Outside of stunts, it was always [the performance of] Tatiana.” Williams explains the two main creative challenges of the work, primarily shared by Weta and Digital Domain: “The faces weren’t incredibly similar. We had to try to bring them to be similar enough so that when you look at She-Hulk, you see Tatiana Maslany,” Williams says, adding that the second challenge was the performance. “It’s a superhero, so it’s an idealized version of a person. There are subtle differences. The balance is trying to figure out how to wrangle those differences in so that it feels like it’s not just her painted green, that it feels like a taller, more muscular version of herself. At the same time [it shouldn’t] lack certain characteristics to make it look like Tatiana.” A 7-foot-tall body double was also filmed. “There were times where the body double would’ve been used in the shot if it was out of focus in the foreground, but mostly it was for reference.”

Star Trek: Picard (Paramount+)

In this fully CG shot from season three, created by Ghost VFX, the Next Generation crew aboard the Enterprise-D aims to defeat the Borg by flying into the core of its ship and destroying it. “What we’re seeing in that specific still is the explosion moments after the Enterprise has hit it with its torpedoes and phasers. So it’s starting to envelop the rest of the cube and break up the pieces around it,” says VFX supervisor Brian Tatosky. “The most challenging part of the shot is the staging of it, in the fact that we start from an exterior, which is the Borg cube, which is five times bigger than we’ve ever seen one before. And we have the Enterprise-D, the ship that we’ve seen in decades of the show and which moves in particular ways, and we expect it to move in particular ways. So it’s how to tell a dynamic action scene with scale because big things, you expect to move slow because they’re big, but we can’t have slow movement throughout the shot.” He explains that this involved “camera choreography, the animation of the ships, how the sphere blows up and breaks up. You want to make it as dynamic and action-filled as possible, but you still have to honor the mass and the scale of everything involved.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.