Back in 2022, Jake Morrison took us behind the scenes of Thor: Love and Thunder. Now, he’s back to reveal the VFX challenges behind Thunderbolts*.
How did you get involved with Thunderbolts*?
I’ve been lucky enough to be collaborating with Marvel for many years now and have a great relationship with them. I’m always amazed when I hear about the Marvel ‘Machine’ when in fact it’s really just a very small group of highly creative individuals. Towards the end of my last movie we started discussing this project called Thunderbolts*. When I heard the title I was sure it was a Kid Hero ensemble and couldn’t have been more wrong as is now abundantly clear!
Once the premise was explained to me I could see it was a really interesting angle on working with existing characters that had already been introduced but in forcing them to work together by circumstances beyond their control it could be a great story with huge potential for both invisible VFX as well as highly visible!
Can you walk us through your role and key responsibilities in bringing the visual effects to life?
As the Production Visual Effects Supervisor I was on the project for 2.5 years – the same as my last one. It’s a lot but it’s that long for a good reasons:
I like to describe the Production VFX Supe job as a Triathlon with 3 distinct parts:
- Pre-Production aka Prep
- Shoot
- Post-Production
The first usually takes place at the Studio (in this case in Los Angeles) and then as you get closer to the actual shoot date, on location as sets are built and shooting locations are scouted. We might squeeze in a little pre-production shooting if possible, for example I shot all the Helicopter Establishers for the Vault Fight sequence in Utah while we were prepping in Atlanta, also squeezing in a full 3D photogrammetry scan of the surround Mesas that we used to generate the fully CG backgrounds for the nighttime Vault work.
The shoot is, as you expect, both a very demanding and very creative portion of the process – the actors are assembled, the sets are built and struck (knocked down) and the schedule is always impossible on paper but is our lodestar.
Post-Production is where the edit takes shape and Director’s Cut is put together. Once the Director presents that to the studio, and sometimes after an audience screening, we consider what’s working, what isn’t and how to fix it.
It’s a monster of a task and it never gets old for me. The responsibility for making informed decisions and suggestions at the start and then shaping the outcome of those decisions till the end goal is extremely challenging but very rewarding indeed.
How was your collaboration with Jake Schreier in shaping the film’s visual aspects, especially balancing action and character moments?
Jake is a highly meticulous director and wanted to discuss and plan all aspects of the film before the shoot which is very welcome.
To take an example the Vault Fight with its four main characters was planned, then stunt-vized, and then re-shot on iPhones while the stunt crew were wearing simple mocap suits. The resulting mocap data was then cleaned up by our previs team, applied to the correct previs representations of the actors and placed in an art department model of the set that was being built. The iPhone footage, edited by Jake, was handed over to the previs team and the mocap was re-lensed to match Jake’s framing, camera dynamics and cutting pattern. The resulting previs edit is spookily similar to what we shot.
The results speak for them selves as we were able to plan exact placing of stunt pads which were ultra-dense foam laser-cut to match the pattern of the floor of the vault and the Art Dept were able to provide flat surfaces (plugs) that would represent the average colour of the VFX Set Extensions that would replace them, allowing for much more accurate bounce-light and reflection on the actors and stunt players.
How did you select vendors and split the VFX work among them?
I often say that vendor casting is almost the most important choice that a VFX Supervisor can make. Like actors for a director, a VFX Supervisor lives or dies by the choices made at the start of the project and so knowing the VFX requirements of the scene and the skillset and specialities of the vendor are crucial – giving creature work to an environmental vendor would be suicide for all involved for example. You also have to make an informed gamble on the scenes that you think may significantly change in post and make sure that the vendors you choose aren’t overloaded to begin with.
Once the ship is sailing you then have to course correct to lighten certain vendors’ load in some types of work to allow them to fully focus on sections of their work which are more complicated.
A good example of this for Thunderbolts* would be ILM’s work. We initially gave them all of the set extension work in the Penthouse as well as all of the set extension work at street level on our 45th St set. Once we got heavily into post and the demands of the Sentry Fight and the exterior Voiding, including the NYC aerial work and the Crane Destruction sequence myself and my VFX Producer Bryan Searing decided to take a chunk of the non-fighting work from the Penthouse from ILM’s plate and award it to Raynault VFX who do superb environment work and compositing. Similarly the street level work that didn’t involve heavy action was lifted off ILM’s shoulders and given to Base FX along with ILM’s NYC street level CG asset which was ingested to allow Base to give us set extensions for large chunks of the street level work, including the emotional scene that Alexei and Yelena have under the 45th St underpass.
How did the VFX team enhance the action sequences while maintaining the physicality of the actors?
It’s a tenet in a stunt fight you must miss. No one actually punches anyone, of course. You can frame a certain shot a certain way to make punch looks like it’s a hit – we call it ‘stacking’ which mean one character is partially obscured by the other and the stunt is down the line of the lens. However, Jake wanted many stunt shots to be in profile which means you literally have nowhere to hide. In addition, stunt choreography is literally that – a dance – and if one stunt played snaps their head back 2 frames before the punch should have landed it may look perfect at the point of shooting but the edit is a cruel beast and those 2 frames become very apparent later.
By pulling a punch a little visually closer, retiming a kick to making it land a half-beat earlier or occasionally making a limb CG to make a pulled punch truly follow through we enhance all of the amazing work our stunt people could do.
When we had to use digi-doubles for physically impossible stunts I would always ask our vendors to use physical accurate ballistic simulations to make sure the physics were correct and then animate over the top of those. Reality is in the eye of the beholder of course but if you start with something that is grounded in a real world sim and then adjust to taste the results always work out stronger.
Can you explain how CGI elements were seamlessly integrated into the practical stunt work?
Any time a weapon is used in the film it’s a stunt version so it is soft and safe. No blanks are used, only gas guns. That means that VFX is tasked with making sure that bendable knives, swords and non-firing guns look vicious and convincing. Often if character contact is required we’ll use a partial weapon, like a sword hilt, and we’re extend the weapon and make it look fully convincing, occasionally correcting the contact point in the body with a 2D nudge or a 3D limb.
How did the VFX team enhance the stunts and action, like the limousine and motorcycle sequence, while ensuring they felt grounded?
When we started the process Jake and I both discussed making the film’s FX as grounded and real as possible, both SFX and VFX at any available opportunity.
Whilst the mechanics of shooting Process Trailer work (where a real vehicle is adapted to be towed at a short distance by a camera crew with multiple mounting points on the vehicle for mounting a camera) is a classic film technique it’s used far less than it used to be in favour of modern LED screens or blue-screens with driving plates.
Both of these offer a huge amount of ease and comfort for both the crew and the actors but they didn’t feel like they’d deliver the extreme realism that the director was aiming for so I lobbied early-on to take the opposite approach and to shoot the Limo sequence on location, miles from anywhere in extreme desert condition. Jake has a serious amount of experience with LED screens from his commercial, music video – and of course his work in the StageCraft volume – and he understood my pitch and agreed, despite knowing the difficulties. We ended up shooting the entirely of the limo sequence on location in Utah on a 3 mile stretch of straight road, miles out of the nearest town (which was barely a town). The SFX demands – Humvee flips & rolls, extreme Stunt Bike work and, of course, the Limousine flip which ends the sequence – all required a large section of the road to be completed cleaned out, re-asphalted and then re-dressed to make it look like the old-school road we’d falling love with.
The VFX work in this sequence notably included my request to have the Bucky motorcycle Stunt Rider wear the lowest-profile crash helmet allowed, but to have it painted ‘Sebastian Stan Skin Pink’ and attached a slightly larger than usual Bucky wig to the bag. Despite the utter hilarity on the part of all crew and performers alike, this approach proved to be an incredibly solid move; great lighting reference, amazing physics ref for hair and in several shots where the camera crew are chasing Bucky’s bike we just reduced the size of the helmet and accompanying wig to get a final.
The location heavy approach allowed us to capture the entirety of the bike and limo sequence in about 5 days, including dialogue, SFX, drone and stunt work and we were in Utah we also leveraged the amazing locations and shot a dawn sequence with an OXE helicopter taking Bob’s ‘Casket’ back to NYC at sunset on the top of a spectacular mesa. Once again I lobbied early to have a real helicopter present despite the fact it would be replaced with a CG version arguing that the downwash, elevated voices and the real hair interaction would make this feel real. Our Line Producer Jason Tamez trusted me, green lit the spend, and the scene truly feels real compared to a full CG build. Raynault VFX built a CG crater around the staged lift-off point as the art department had restrictions… dinosaur bones are present at the site!
Can you elaborates about the creation of the complex oner where the heroes confront Sentry?
It was a beast. We split the shooting between Main and 2nd Unit and I opted to stay with the sequence rather than Main Unit. I knew we’d want to have a repeatable camera for oh so many reasons so we brought in one of the new 25’ Technodolly cranes. The advantage of that system is that is allows you to establish a shot live with an operator on the ‘wheels’, responding to an actor’s performance, but once you have the take in the bag you can infinitely repeat the camera move.
The key to making the shot feel free for me was Lewis Pullman’s performance. He was 100% front and centre – he is the entire focus of the shot – I wanted to make sure he was CG the very least amount possible; it’s a day-light scene in a penthouse with 270º wraparound windows so there’s literally nowhere to hide. I broke the shot down into three possible cutting moments within whip pans and then worked with the ADs to schedule each of the pieces with the cast members that actively engaged with Lewis. After we’d stripped the shot down to the bare bones it became a matter of Lewis learning the blocking & choreography and then responding to what the other cast members did in the moment. We nailed a very strong take for each of the three sections with Jake directing Lewis and then I was let loose to shoot the stunt passes and various plates over a few days using the repeatability of the Technodolly to zero in on specific moments in the fight and shoot fight or wire work with a (now) prescribed camera move.
It was incredibly technically challenging, took months of planning, a week of shooting across two units and 10 months of post-production with ILM leading the charge, Rising Sun Pictures handling the face replacements on the stunt work and Digital Domain lending a hand at the end! As a Visual Effects Supervisor you always enjoy a challenge and this was a massive one!
Can you describe the design process for Sentry and the challenges in creating his visual look?
The interesting thing about Sentry is that he has literally All The Powers. In our film he is just discovering what he can do, live in the moment. From a design point of view it was carte blanche, we could literally write the playbook, but the tone of the film is so grounded and realistic that even though we were do a Marvel-y superhero thing we still wanted to keep everything looking physically plausible. The telekinesis effect, which is amazingly simple and is a high frequency vibration style ‘hummingbird’ effect was entirely born from Francisco Ramirez, one of our VFX Editors. Simple design, very elegant and it just stuck! The speed effects and the force-bubble repellent effect were executed by ILM but again the key challenge was making these effects feel physically plausible and not too showy / CG.
What were the biggest challenges in designing The Void, especially with his all-black appearance, and how did the VFX team approach animating his shadow powers and creating the atmosphere of dread as New York is plunged into darkness?
For me, The Void was the single greatest challenge on the project.
There are there are three completely different types of Void – the character, the street-level ‘zapping’ and the wide Manhattan threat. Designing these three completely different looks and making them all visually interesting but immediately obviously linked for the audience was an amazing task to be handed! I was further constrained by Jake and Kevin’s desire to make the effects feel like something we could have potentially done optically in the 70s, 80s or 90s.
Each of them was approached completely differently.
The close-up ‘Void as a Character’ look took months of experiments to get an approach that we all liked. After extensive testing we decided that breaking the silhouette was a no-no. Things got too partice-ly and overtly CG or very Flame-y very quickly. We drilled down on the most hardcore approach in the end. Nothing.
But of course, Nothing is a little dull and the actor is superb, so the challenge here became how much of the performance do you show – less is more but too much less is nothing! We basically ended up back in the hand-rotoscoping days of the original Lord of the Rings film in 1978 where they shot live-action for use in an animated film and handtraced it. Literally every frame of the Void was put under scrutiny and refined.
The Zapping? That was me just trying to come up with something that could have been done optically. From a technical point of view you could have done this years ago with a repeatable camera; two passes and the art department spray paint the nightmarish shadows. But we didn’t do that to give us editorial flexibility and this is the sort of thing VFX is supposed to be good at. From a design point of view, terrifying, we leaned into the Hiroshima Shadows. Once again we did months of research and design-tests until we came up with something so darkly simple I’m amazed it works – one second you’re there, the next second you’re not.
The 3rd and final Voiding is the world-wide threat.
The idea for that was inspired by helicopter units I’d directed over NYC. Once you get up there you notice quickly that it’s Midtown that has, frankly, the pointiest profile as the cluster of buildings just south of Central Park get very tall very quickly. We’d been discussing ways to fill the streets with darkness, and to hint that it could extend further and further until it encompassed the entire world. In keeping with the more optical look that Jake was aiming for I started to consider that if you regarded the Void character, floating above Stark Tower (in reality the MetLife Building at the top of Park Ave) as the only light source in New York rather than a ‘shadow source’ you’d cast some very elegant radial shadows. Once that was established you could slowly lower him down to street level and you would create a similar look to a sunset – very very long shadows – but again they would be centred on the character.
I asked our previs team to do a quick render test of a light source dropping in the centre of the city and the results were exactly what we’d been looking for; shadows that were organic, natural and terrifying in their simplicity.
Reflecting on Thunderbolts*, what are you most proud of in terms of the visual effects, and after such a big project, what’s next for you?
I’m a big fan of the approach we took across the board; shoot as much in camera as possible as if VFX didn’t exist and then take the work into post and move into a traditional VFX mode – grey screens and painted flats for set extensions really made the actors feel so much more present, natural and frankly un-processed in a non-digital way.
From a design point of view The Void was such a delicious challenge. Coming up with something new nowadays is so hard given the sheer volume of films and television that rely on VFX. On top of that being told that we had to make whatever the effect was look like we could have done it pre-digital with optical printers, hand-cutting mattes with razor-blades ala the original Tron made it all the more challenging, and of course, fun.
Our visual effects vendors really stepped up on this one and embraced the in-camera feel across the board. I couldn’t be more proud of them and the work they did and I hope they all enjoyed the final product.
Next for me? After two and a half years getting this beastie into the theatres it’s a holiday and some travel!
A big thanks for your time.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
Digital Domain: Dedicated page about Thunderbolts* on Digital Domain website.
Framestore: Dedicated page about Thunderbolts* on Framestore website.
ILM: Dedicated page about Thunderbolts* on ILM website.
Raynault VFX: Dedicated page about Thunderbolts* on Raynault VFX website.
Rising Sun Pictures: Dedicated page about Thunderbolts* on Rising Sun Pictures website.
© Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025
