WandaVision it was an important moment for Disney. It was the company’s first attempt to expand its Marvel cinematic universe to its streaming service, Disney Plus, after more than a decade focused on theatrical releases. And a big part of maintaining that continuity was the visuals. WandaVision it was a relatively strange program, with a storyline that spanned a few decades of the sitcom’s history, and had an aesthetics to match. But managed to combine black and white Bewitchedstyled visuals with classic MCU battles that span the city in a way that somehow seemed natural.
According to Tara DeMarco, the program’s visual effects supervisor, the WandaVisionThe special effects were no different because they were intended for living rooms. “Visual effects for Marvel features and streaming [shows] they are treated very similarly in terms of quality expectations. And really, we are all at the service of a story, ”she says. The Verge. “It’s just that some of our stories are longer than others.”
Now that the show is over, I had a chance to speak to DeMarco about creating these classic sitcom effects, projecting the ever-present Hex that surrounds the city of Westview, filming those big superhero battles and, of course, the face in CG of Vision. Here are some highlights from our chat.
This story contains spoilers of light for WandaVisionfirst season of.
About the classic sitcom visual effects
The first episodes were a collaboration between all departments – but particularly, production design and special effects and visual effects – to determine what could be achieved with puppeteers in each set. And then the special effects would go away and manipulate the different props that could be given by props, and then we could make different wire works as elements and combine them later. We determined in advance that we would get as many practical puppet effects as we could, and the visual effects would combine or augment them.
Puppet effects are used on television sometimes – you just don’t know. And it’s really a way of getting an object that someone can act on and have something real in the scene that you can take and maybe duplicate or create in CG in another way. But we usually use wires to place objects in scenes. The difference is that we were honoring programs that put wire jokes in a very specific way for the public to know. Therefore, the dish that heals is a great tip on how they would have done it at the time.
DeMarco also notes that while the team did a lot of research on how the effects were originally done on these programs, they did have some help: Dan Sudick, head of the special visual effects department, grew up with a neighbor who worked as a puppeteer in Bewitched. “We had an internal source,” says DeMarco.
No Hex covering Westview
Hex was really driven by the story point of each scene. So that first sight of it, when Monica is pulled inside, where we see a kind of invisible wall and it is a mystery, was made to really disturb the audience. And so we wanted it to be a little invisible, a little visible, unknown, and to affect it in an unknown way, but using the language of television. This was driven by [director] Matt Shakman and what he wanted the tone of the scene to be, in terms of what the audience should take away.
Each progression of Hex was similar, in the next episode, we wanted to show that Wanda was angry because Hayward had flown a drone at his home. Then, at the end of the episode, we turned it red, violently red, to show both its power and what was meant to be a strict limit. She was not kidding. And then in the subsequent Hexes, it was really important to show Wanda about keeping people out or letting them in, and rewriting objects to fit her Westview.
And every time we work at Hex, we just make sure it was clear that it was made of cathode lines from old tube and pixelation TVs and lots of cool RGB chromatic aberration effects so you could see the colors split in three like the old logo from Trinitron.
DeMarco adds that keeping Hex largely a mystery, especially for the first few episodes, was important. “The idea was not to show off much,” she says.
In that big battle in the last episode
All the great scenes, we start with the script first, and then in the frames, if we have them, [pre-visualization]. Therefore, there is an evolution in all these scenes so that we have an idea of how the work will be. After going through a preview scene, and [director Matt Shakman] like the preview, then we would break each scene and try to figure out which pieces we could capture with a human or a set, to keep it as real as possible, and then the next stage is what we could increase in CG, or what we could start with a human and then maybe do a double digital look.
Our last resort is a fully CG scene. Because we wanted the most real and inside the camera that we could keep, knowing that there should be big MCU beats. So we flew with many actors by wires. We flew Visions on wires in a library set, we flew witches on wires on a green screen set. But we try to get the basic elements with practical pieces as much as possible.
On Vision’s CG face
I am most proud of all our Visions. I’m really loving the fact that after [Disney Plus behind-the-scenes documentary Assembled aired], people didn’t seem to notice that he had a CG face. So the fact that we were able to execute Vision in so many ages and so many looks – dead, white, on the operating table in pieces, through all the sitcom emotion – and no one questioning that, they were focusing on Vision and in the performance of the character and not in the fact that he has a CG face. It gives me a warm feeling.