‘The Boys' VFX supervisor Stephan Fleet explains why a one-minute shot ‘took about 17 hours' to make

Yahoo

3 days ago

'We don't want the simple way,' proclaims The Boys visual effects supervisor Stephan Fleet, who joined Gold Derby's "Meet the Experts" VFX panel. 'We don't want the obvious magic trick that everyone's seen before. So even something you read on the page that you think could be the most simple thing, like a split screen of someone, can be a very complicated thing to do.' Watch the full interview above.
The Prime Video series was adapted from the comic book series of the same name by Eric Kripke. It focuses on a group of vigilantes trying to take down corrupt superheroes. 'The original pitch to me, before I signed on, was that this isn't a superhero show. This is a show about the intersection of celebrity and politics, told if celebrities were superheroes," Fleet says. "I love superhero shows. I watch them. I've worked on ones myself. But in this case, I'm looking at it as a satire on celebrity and politics first. So you're always trying to find, no matter how absurd, a foundation of something real to base everything off of. We're always trying to find that basis in reality on the show, and then just crank it up to 11 if we have to.'
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Fleet acknowledges that 'every season our wonderful team of writers led by Eric Kripke are gonna try and raise the stakes in some way.' And the recent fourth season is no exception. A new character, called Splinter, was able to clone himself multiple times, which led to the visual effects team needing to work on a scene with multiple Splinters performing sexual acts. He explains, 'Fully nude clones means a lot of matching. Their whole bodies have to look identical. So there's a lot of replacement and prosthetics too, if you can read between the lines.'
The trickiest scene was when seven Splinters were all in one shot. Fleet says, 'It's about a minute long motion control shot. There's no face replacement; it's all the actor playing himself. It took about 17 hours total to rehearse and film this one shot. Anyone who's done visual effects knows motion control can be a very slow and complicated process.'
'On The Boys, we found our tone and we do it in our way," Fleet continues. "I just wanna keep honoring everything in the show with visual effects and never make it about the visual effects. But I want to also acknowledge that visual effects are an important component of the storytelling.'
This article and video are presented by Prime Video.
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