Mark O. Hammond, VFX supervisor at Mr. X (https://mrxfx.com) in Toronto, says the studio took on a big chunk of the character and creature work featured in Season 2 of the Netflix series Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega.
"My job was to carry that work from previs all the way through final, working closely with overall VFX supervisor, Tom Turnbull, and the other vendors to keep everything consistent," Hammond shares. "We weren’t doing huge shot counts. We had the hard ones - the creatures and transformations that had to hold up under scrutiny. Day to day a lot of it is creative problem-solving, but just as much is making sure the team has what it needs and the look doesn’t fall apart shot to shot."
For Season 2, the visual effects increased to include more creature work. In addition to existing characters, new characters would also debut.
"The Hyde was the one everyone knows, but asset-wise, it was a rebuild," he explains. "We inherited it from Season 1, so we couldn’t change who he was, but we were asked to make him look better and feel heavier. He came to us basically as a shell - no real internal anatomy underneath, so we rebuilt him from the inside out. We gave him a proper skeleton, muscle and fat layers that actually slide and settle, skin that moves with the weight beneath it, and a fully photoreal eye system built up from the right anatomy rather than faked."
Some of the studio's bigger builds were the new creatures. Mama Hyde, for example, was created from scratch.
"She went a different direction," Hammond notes. "Thin and sinewy - every tendon and bone reading right under the skin. The weight coming from how she carries herself rather than bulk."
The Gorgon was also new and built from the ground up.
"The show lives or dies on you not questioning any of it," says Hammond of the VFX. "A girl turns to stone, a monster bursts through a stained glass window, it just has to be true."
Mr. X uses Autodesk Maya to rig and animated character. SideFX Houdini is used for the creature sims, the transformations, FX and rendering.
"For performance, we captured motion using Xsens suits to drive the creatures, and for the new season we’re moving to Cartwheel, a markerless mocap solution we just used on del Toro’s latest Patrón commercial, The Perfect Pour."
Compositing is performed using Foundry's Nuke.
"The Hyde rebuild and Mama Hyde leaned heavily on our creature team doing shot-specific sculpting on the transformations," he notes.
Two sequences from the Season 2 finale stand out in terms of VFX, Hammond shares. The first is the Hyde versus Mama Hyde fight.
"We rebuilt the Hyde and built Mama Hyde from scratch, so getting the two of them on-screen together was the payoff. They’re related, but they’re not the same creature - different weight, different age, and the trick was making the fight feel like it actually hurt. Like there was real mass behind it, instead of two digital assets bumping into each other. We also built a hero Nevermore roof for the full-CG shots, so we could put the camera anywhere and stay in there with the creatures."
The second highlight he points to is the Gorgon.
"He was a great character to build. The snakes alone were an exercise in micro-choreography. Dozens of individual performers that had to read as one living mass without ever looking locked together. We built a hierarchy, a few hero snakes carrying the action, but any one of them could still break off and do its own thing. The hard part was getting him to feel alive and menacing, rather than a static design with movement bolted on."