General

Visual effects supervisor Bill Georgiou and associate visual effects supervisors Stephen Tong, George Kuruvilla, and Arnab Sanyal discuss ILM’s visual effects contributions to the final season of Netflix’s hit series.

By Jay Stobie

The struggle against Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) rises to an epic crescendo in the fifth and final season of Netflix’s Stranger Things (2016-2025), as Jane “Eleven” Hopper (Millie Bobby Brown) and her friends seek out their foe in a bid to protect Hawkins from impending doom.

ILM visual effects supervisor Bill Georgiou and ILM associate visual effects supervisors Stephen Tong, George Kuruvilla, and Arnab Sanyal spoke with ILM.com to highlight Industrial Light & Magic’s visual effects contributions to all eight episodes of season five, which included crafting the gruesome membrane wall surrounding the Upside Down, creating the Demogorgon attack on the MAC-Z base, melting a room around Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) and Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), and much more.

Accessing the Upside Down

“I was the ILM visual effects supervisor for Stranger Things, and I oversaw our global team,” Bill Georgiou shares with ILM.com. “Each ILM studio – Sydney, Vancouver, and Mumbai – was run by very talented associate visual effects supervisors – Stephen, George, and Arnab – who I worked closely with. I also worked directly with the clients, in this case, the Duffer Brothers and client-side visual effects supervisor Betsy Paterson, and I even spent almost two months on the set with them. ILM was initially awarded around 1,200 shots overall, spread across every episode.”

The scope of ILM’s shots was vast, encompassing a range of visual effects disciplines. Whether ILM was adding major environmental extensions to bolster the Hawkins set and provide a bird’s-eye view of the town, inserting spores throughout the Upside Down’s air, or working with assets like digital doubles, Demogorgons, and a massive vine creature, every department was involved. Given the breadth of ILM’s duties, the schedule and availability of the artists at ILM’s Sydney, Vancouver, and Mumbai studios determined who received which tasks. “I was the associate visual effects supervisor in Sydney,” Stephen Tong relays. “We did about 600 shots in Sydney, and I had the pleasure to be with Bill in the same office, which made things a lot easier.”“

ILM’s Vancouver studio did about 350 finals in total,” associate visual effects supervisor George Kuruvilla notes about his site’s responsibilities. “While Bill sleeps, we get everything else ready on this side of the world [laughs].” Associate visual effects supervisor Arnab Sanyal, whose site is ILM’s newest addition, reports, “I managed the team here in Mumbai, and we got over 250 shots. When ILM’s Mumbai studio began in 2022, many of us came to ILM from other studios. Our team was growing, so the initial projects we did consisted of basic-level work. However, year after year, our projects are getting more and more complex, which shows that the more established ILM sites have trust in us. We’re always doing something interesting, and that’s the best part. As a creative, that is the type of assignment that we look for.”

A Memorable Membrane Wall

The seemingly infinite membrane wall surrounding the Upside Down became an asset that embodied ILM’s global approach to the project. While production had built a portion of the wall on set for the actors, ILM needed to extend the otherworldly barrier into the vast unknown and modify it for multiple scenes. Although the digital asset was built at ILM’s Sydney studio, the other two sites needed to alter it for their own shots. For example, while Vancouver focused on Steve Harrington’s (Joe Keery) car striking the wall, Mumbai handled the sequence where Eleven and Jim Hopper (David Harbour) fight the army at its foundation.

The Sydney studio tackled the wide establishing shots of the wall, as Tong explains, “We needed the wall to look good in wide, medium, and close-up shots. When we do big environments, you normally think of hard surfaces, like mountains and rocks, but this was more of an organic, fleshy wall. There was liquid running down the wall, and then we needed to tear it and heal it – George’s team had to put a BMW through the wall and do all sorts of creative things.”

Georgiou concurs, recalling, “There was so much look development time put into that wall. We started with a fleshy concept that the client provided. We looked at all kinds of medical reference, and it had to have a very visceral, human feeling to it. We worked on the wall for about six months, if not longer, and based it on human tendons, veins, and pustules. All of the work that we did was grounded in reality in one way, shape, or form. Our references were quite gross [laughs], and our texture and look dev artists had to look at the worst of it all. It was pretty horrific at times. The wall had to have a subsurface component as well because the characters were shining flashlights onto it, and we needed to see light disperse through it.”

“In dailies, when we talked about some of the liquids, we used food as reference because people know the difference in viscosity between honey and blood, for example,” Tong reveals. Turning to the hole that is eventually torn into the wall, Kuruvilla echoes Georgiou’s observations about the grotesque nature of certain references, saying, “The client requested the wall to feel like it had been ripped, so we looked at photos of the inside of a whale. The edges needed to feel like a butcher’s knife had gone through it.”

Mumbai set its sights on another section of the wall, where Eleven and Hopper take refuge behind a billboard before clashing with the army. “The main asset for the membrane wall came from Sydney, but our angle of the wall was slightly different from theirs, so we had to work on the asset for our shots. There is a massive amount of detailing that normal viewers might not notice,” Sanyal opines. One such component even consisted of a soldier urinating on the membrane wall, which meant that, as the ILM team recalls with a laugh, they needed to run effects simulations so that the liquid’s properties lined up precisely with how the filmmakers wanted it to appear on screen.

The Void and a Vine

After Steve Harrington’s BMW collides with the membrane wall, a thrilling sequence sees the car pulled through the opening and out into a nebulous void. “We started with a full CG shot where the camera moves through the hole in the membrane wall, and when it goes onto the other side, you’re in the void and look up to see a different scale of the wall,” Kuruvilla remarks about the Vancouver studio’s approach. “The challenge is the scale because on one side of the wall you see Jonathan and Nancy standing in front of it, and you sense that it is infinite – but you don’t see it go on forever.”

Georgiou agrees, acknowledging, “Scale was so important. The BMW is literally flying through, and the camera’s following it, but then, as the camera turns around, we’re supposed to see the ‘inside out’ version of the wall. The level of detail was quite high, but the detail scale had to be quite small so that it felt enormous and as if our camera had traveled a huge distance away to be able to see the entirety of this wormhole-shaped wall.”

When the time came to work on a vine creature from the Upside Down that has been captured by the military, ILM sought to keep the visual language consistent with the membrane wall. “This massive vine had to have its own character. Vines are particularly tough to do, especially when they have to wrap around an actor. In this case, it had to wrap around Hopper’s neck and lift him up. We spent a lot of time in look development to get the vine to be realistic and have similarities to the wall with pustules and a mucus covering,” Georgiou divulges.

The vine’s interaction with Hopper’s neck was a notable obstacle, as the character’s attire and features acted as hurdles to making that interaction believable. “They filmed the shots using a pool noodle around David Harbour’s heavily bearded face and neck as he was suspended from the ceiling,” Georgiou describes. “To keep the vine alive, we were required to add additional motion and rotation which meant that both his clothing and long hair and beard would need to move and interact with the vine. We meticulously match moved and look-deved the actor with a digi-double and created a groom for his hair. Both the hair and the clothing were then simulated to allow us to get the pressure of the vine’s squeeze and shadows from the various set lights onto David.”

“On top of that, the shots were very difficult to integrate for compositing,” Tong asserts. “The on-set lighting had many spinning lights off-screen. It was a hazy environment, and the atmosphere changes in every frame as the particle light spins. So, when you integrate something with the plates in those lighting conditions, you have to be careful to match those levels and the haziness.”

MAC-Z Mayhem

Another entity essential to the Upside Down was Stranger Things’s legendary Demogorgon design. Wētā FX upgraded the Demogorgon model from previous seasons and passed it to ILM for their own Demogorgon sequences, where the team then modified the creatures for an attack on the MAC-Z military base in the center of Hawkins. “The Demogorgons are iconic to the series, and it was so cool to work on them and their look dev,” emphasizes Georgiou, whose tenure on set was largely devoted to overseeing this climactic battle, which gradually results in the Demogorgons becoming dirtier, bloodier, and even burned. “I will never look at barbecued chicken the same way,” Georgiou jokes about the reference ILM used for the burned Demogorgon.

ILM placed blood maps on the Demogorgons’ arms, legs, and chests to reflect the carnage they wrought, as ILM’s sequence required the team to supply a different type of Demogorgon performance than the show’s other vendors. Whether the Demogorgons are lifting or stomping the soldiers they faced, it was necessary to have simulations for skin sliding and muscle movements. The effects team added drool and blood, while impact points were created so the animation department could depict dents in the Demogorgons’ skin where bullets were impacting them.

“Our animation team was incredible, as both Mumbai and Sydney did a fantastic job with getting the physicality and weight for the Demogorgons,” Georgiou proclaims before expressing his joy over seeing ILM animators film themselves lumbering, slashing, and roaring to provide reference, commenting, “For creatures that are eight-plus feet tall and have extremely long arms and claws, with enough strength to jump across entire sets, they worked really well.”

As the fight unfolds at the MAC-Z, Demogorgons also pursue children through an underground tunnel. “Mumbai had those Demogorgon shots,” Sanyal explains. “The Demogorgon’s animation and the way it moves were not easy things to do because it was not human-like, but not truly animal-like either. When Will Byers [Noah Schnapp] uses his telekinetic power, we had to determine how the Demogorgons would react, shake, move, and finally break.” Tong also beams about reviewing the shocking revelation in dailies, reminiscing, “When Will stopped the Demogorgon from killing Mike Wheeler [Finn Wolfhard], I knew this scene was going to make fans jump on the sofa and scream. It’s so iconic and unexpected.”

Demogorgon movements weren’t the only delicate aspect of the tunnel scene spearheaded by the Mumbai studio. “We tackled three or four rifts within the tunnel, with the most intricate details in the closing one,” Sanyal states. “Imagine a spider drawing an insect into its web – that’s how a child was being pulled into the rift, and the entire web reacted to their movement. Our FX team handled this unique and challenging work, resulting in a truly amazing final output!”

An On-Set One-Shot

Speaking to the time he spent on set in Atlanta for the MAC-Z battle, Georgiou elaborates, “Being on set was wonderful, and it was the only way for me to be able to understand the scope of that sequence. Production built this tremendously huge 360-degree set where they had shipping containers stacked seven or eight high, covered in blue screen for the set extensions. There were over 100 extras and 150 lights from every direction flashing on set. I was there early to watch the rehearsals and see the choreography of how it was going to go down. The Duffer Brothers were kind and generous with their help and questions, and they asked our opinions too.”

A lengthy shot in which Mike Wheeler and his companions attempt to avoid the chaos as Demogorgons wreak havoc on the base was done in a continuous take and represents one of the primary reasons for Georgiou’s presence on set, as he outlines, “The oner was a huge accomplishment. It was filmed handheld and with a fast shutter speed, so it looked like war journalism footage.”

As delicate as the on-set choreography was, ILM’s postproduction work was equally taxing. “Everything had to line up on set, but then it took a long time to put the layout all together. We had to animate, light, and comp on top of the plates. The 100-plus soldiers have muzzle flashes, their guns are emitting shells, the bullets create dents as they hit the Demogorgons’ skin, the Demogorgons have breath and their bodies are sweaty – there’s so much detail put into the oner, and into the MAC-Z sequence as a whole, and it went off without a hitch.”

Extending an Exterior

A second military base resides in the Upside Down, and Eleven infiltrates it by leaping over its perimeter. A set was constructed on a soundstage, but ILM needed to build a large extension for the base’s exterior and connect it to the set piece. “We started with the asset and did a significant extension of the base,” says Sanyal before turning to an intriguing fact about ILM’s contributions to the scene. “When Eleven is running prior to her jump, there are vines all around. We made sure the vines were properly placed and physically accurate from one shot to another in order to maintain continuity.

“Once Eleven jumps, she lands on a practical glass roof, but many shots in that area were completely CG,” Sanyal continues. “To integrate those shots, everything had to be balanced so the CG portions looked like the same type of glass roof that she jumped onto. It was an exciting sequence to work on. The military base asset was originally created to be smaller, so we rebuilt on top of it. There was barbed wire and multiple spotlights around it, and we wanted the lighting to pick up those interesting highlights.”

A Melting Menace

In another intense scene, Nancy and Jonathan become trapped in a room within the Upside Down’s version of the Hawkins laboratory as the facility essentially melts around them. Although this was filmed on set, the client determined the gray material they had used for sludge was too thin and had surface air bubbles that made it appear too much like water. The Vancouver studio was tasked with replacing that practically-filmed liquid with a substance even thicker than house paint.

“We were concerned about continuity and coming up with the reality, weight, and viscosity of the fluid that the characters were moving through. They were walking through it and pushing their hands through, so there was interactivity that was happening. The fluid needed to feel thick and viscous, and ultimately every background – the walls and floor, and even the surface of the table that Nancy and Jonathan were sitting on – was completely replaced,” Georgiou discloses.

Kuruvilla shares Georgiou’s perspective on the matter of ensuring that the melting remained consistent, stating, “One of the things that I found most challenging was keeping continuity across the shots while the walls were melting. When you’re replacing a fluid and matching something that’s real, you’re matching a physics-based simulation and taking it over in CG. Blending between CG and the plates is the hardest part.”

Upside Down Destruction

The melting room’s strange properties are caused by an energy sphere atop the Hawkins lab. The client-supplied brief described the sphere as having an outer shell that cloaks its interior core, but exploring the specifics was left to ILM. “One of the amazing things about this client is that we weren’t just a vendor – they were looking for partners in creating and building these otherworldly things,” Georgiou begins. “ILM had a spectacular concept artist in [visual effects art director] Amy Beth Christenson, who created the first images of the sphere and the sphere breaking apart. That art served as our inspiration for our two years of working on the show. From there, the effects team looked at cellular structures and human body-heavy references.”

In time, the sphere explodes, unleashing enough energy to wipe out the Upside Down, including the membrane wall. “An energy wave hits the membrane wall, and Vancouver was involved in that destruction. The wall is such a large and tricky asset – it’s so detailed, and it has effects like mucus and other elements that run over top of the wall,” Kuruvilla professes. “Destruction-wise, our effects teams did simulations on the wall, and we built veins, membranes, and fleshy pieces inside the wall to accentuate the break and tear as the energy hit it.”

The catastrophic demolition strikes many familiar landmarks in the Upside Down. “The Vancouver studio built the Hawkins High School. There’s the school and a packed car park, so we researched which types of cars were there at that point and kept it as faithful to the references as possible,” Kuruvilla continues. “Our last build was the Wheeler house, and our artists went through images from seasons one through four. They got drawings and plans of the set to figure out where the basement would be and what the wallpaper was. Where the kids play their games, the artists put up the same posters and all sorts of references from the show for when the house would be destroyed.”

The sphere’s explosion reaches a heartwrenching conclusion at the rift gate linking the MAC-Z base to the Upside Down, where Eleven stands defiantly as the rest of the Upside Down is being torn down behind her. “ILM’s Sydney studio did some of the destruction behind Eleven in that last emotional scene. The look of it came from the effects team, and we were very grateful. Many of our team members are fans of the show and wanted to add stuff that they think is cool and appropriate to the world of Stranger Things,” Tong affirms.

Spore Wars

While sensational effects tend to get the majority of fans’ attention, even the subtle spores residing in the Upside Down’s air throughout the season provided ILM with an opportunity to work its magic. “The spores have their own individual rotation, so we built them like a ravioli to have some width and thickness in their center. This way, when they rotated toward the camera, you wouldn’t lose them as if they were a single plane. That rotation, plus any camera motion, became challenging because it could quickly start to look too much like snow or as if we’re traveling through hyperspace in the Millennium Falcon,” Georgiou concludes.

The filmmakers art directed the spores’ placement and movement, guaranteeing each scene contained the right amount of spores while avoiding any errant spores falling in undesirable locations. “Since the spores are transparent, our work depends on what the back plate is. There’s no set formula to say we’re going to do, for example, 70% opacity and have it work across the whole shot – it’s not going to be like that. If the plate is too dark or too light underneath, we have to manually change the spores’ opacity or the sharpness of the edges to work with the plates.”

Sanyal hones in on the troubles inherent with lighting the spores that ILM’s Mumbai studio inserted into Eleven’s battle with the army near the billboard, imparting, “There are spores all around, and we need to consider how they will react to every light. The soldiers carried guns, and each gun had a light source attached to it. Every time the guns move, the spores in that area need to react to it. Most people don’t realize how much effort goes into our work. When you genuinely dive into the levels of detail that are required, it’s incredible. The spores are so minute, but their behavior and movements are specific. Spores kept us on our toes for a long time [laughs].”

A Worldwide Wonder

The smooth collaboration across ILM’s Sydney, Vancouver, and Mumbai studios on the final season of Stranger Things demonstrates the extent of ILM’s capabilities as a global visual effects powerhouse. “This show is a great example of ILM’s cross-site workflows. Our supervisors and teams all worked together. The level of communication was terrific, and that can be hard – you can have too much conversation, where people are talking and not enough is getting done. At the same time, you can have too little, where things get missed and extra time is needed to solve something. But on this show, right from the start, we were so well-aligned and efficient,” Kuruvilla attests.

“Our three sites worked together so well,” Tong adds. “Production expertly split the work between us, establishing the schedule of who developed what and how these assets would come together in a way that each studio could deliver their work on time. Bill is always so nice to work with and accessible, especially when his office is next to mine [laughs]. If I have questions or anything I want to show him, I can get feedback or approval as soon as possible, so the team can keep going and get the shot done.”

“This sort of collaboration is what ILM is all about. In almost every show we take on, we are working with multiple ILM sites,” Sanyal observes. “We received so much support from the Sydney studio – my CG supervisor, Kunjal Dedhia, stayed in continuous touch with theirs because there were assets that we were handing over to each other. The collaboration we see at ILM is important, and it’s unique compared to other places I’ve worked. Everyone here feels part of the same team and shares the goal of delivering a show to the best of their ability – the only difference is the time zone.”

For Georgiou, having the role of overall ILM visual effects supervisor meant stepping back at times to allow his associate visual effects supervisors to lead their respective studios. “I actually had to pull myself out of being as involved with the Sydney team because I was so used to being as available as possible, and I needed to let Stephen – and George and Arnab, as well – work with their teams on their own and build those relationships. They are so smart and gifted, and watching them encourage and support their artists blew me away,” Georgiou avows.

Kuruvilla praises the range of tasks ILM completed this season, saying, “The sheer volume of work that ILM took on for this season was astounding. We did such an immense number of varied shots and sequences with different assets – there was so much cool stuff in one show, and it was so rewarding to be a part of it.” Tong confirms, specifying, “The visual effects are so diverse. Digital doubles, environments, big effects, plate-based work, full-CG work, characters – it’s all there.”

Of course, confronting such monumental assignments is what ILM thrives on, as Georgiou contends, “Working on Stranger Things felt like having Christmas morning every day – waking up and opening shots from Vancouver, and then looking at the new shots in our daily sessions from Sydney and Mumbai. It was a joy.”

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Jay Stobie (he/him) is a writer, author, and consultant who has contributed articles to ILM.com, Skysound.com, Star Wars Insider, StarWars.com, Star Trek Explorer, Star Trek Magazine, and StarTrek.com. Jay loves sci-fi, fantasy, and film, and you can learn more about him by visiting JayStobie.com or finding him on Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms at @StobiesGalaxy.

Industrial Light & Magic artists Marc Whitelaw and Maia Kayser discuss the studio’s work on director Sam Raimi’s Send Help, and how its rampaging boar sequence evolved into something bloodier and funnier.

By Jamie Benning

There’s a moment in Send Help (2026) when the film shows its hand. What begins as a familiar survival setup quickly escalates into something far more chaotic. Stranded on a desert island, Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) is attacked by a wild boar. After an extended moment of intensity, the audience settles into laughter, waiting to see what comes next.

It’s a tonal balancing act rooted in the filmmaking of Sam Raimi. Across films like The Evil Dead (1981) and Drag Me to Hell (2009), Raimi has consistently pushed horror into a space where shock and humor sit side by side. The violence is heightened, the reactions are exaggerated, and the audience is invited to laugh as much as recoil.

ILM’s work focused on bringing the boar to life and shaping the escalation of the attack, balancing physical realism with increasingly exaggerated behavior. The challenge was not simply to create a believable creature, but to understand how far that believability could be stretched.

Escalation as a Creative Process

What defines the sequence is not just how extreme it becomes, but how deliberately that escalation was shaped by the filmmakers. It doesn’t begin at full intensity. It builds, step by step, each beat pushing the limits of what feels plausible before extending beyond it.

That progression emerged through iteration. Early versions of the work aimed for something grounded, integrating the creature naturally into the environment. But with each pass, it became clear that realism alone wasn’t going to carry the scene.

Marc Whitelaw, lead digital artist and compositor at Industrial Light & Magic, explains how quickly that restraint fell away once the tone of the film began to assert itself. “We started off fairly reserved, holding things back and integrating the creature into the plates,” he tells ILM.com. “But throughout production, it just kept going further and further until we were essentially making blood. We added so much blood.”

What’s notable is that this escalation wasn’t something the team had to fight for. In many productions, there’s a point where things are pulled back, where excess is trimmed in favor of control. Here, the opposite happened. Each version went further, and the response was to go further still.

“It felt like no matter how far we went, the response was always ‘yes, yes, yes,’” notes Whitelaw. That direction often came down to a simple note from Raimi: “kill, kill, kill.” It became something of a guiding principle for the sequence, not just in terms of violence, but in how far each moment could go.

That kind of feedback loop changes how a sequence is built. Instead of working toward a fixed target, the team was discovering the tone in real time, using each iteration to redefine what felt appropriate. By the end of the process, ideas that might once have seemed excessive became essential. “We even had an eyeball pop out of its socket, and it all seemed to work,” Whitelaw adds. “Sam clearly knew what he was looking for, and I think we delivered that.”

A Different Kind of Production

That freedom to push the boundaries was shaped in part by the scale of the project itself. Coming off a large production, Whitelaw found that the transition to a smaller team immediately changed the way the work developed. Fewer layers meant faster feedback and a more direct exchange of ideas between departments. “I finished on Tron: Ares (2025) before joining Send Help. It was a huge project with a big team, so moving onto something much smaller was a really nice contrast. Even though there was still a lot of work to get through, it felt very different.”

Where larger shows can become segmented, this environment allows ideas to move more fluidly. Departments were working in constant dialogue, shaping the sequence collectively rather than handing it off stage by stage. “We worked very closely together. It was collaborative and quite intimate between departments, with a lot of cross communication and shared problem solving,” says Whitelaw.

Just as important was the proximity to the filmmakers. Rather than reacting to notes after the fact, the team was seeing those reactions in real time, adjusting and evolving the work as the tone became clearer. “Being in client calls with Sam Raimi and seeing his reactions firsthand, then watching him take ideas and run with them, made it a really fun project. I had a great time.”

Alongside the digital work, the filmmakers also captured practical elements on set to help sell the interaction. Blood hits were captured directly with Rachel McAdams, giving the sequence a tactile base that could then be enhanced further in post.

For animation supervisor Maia Kayser, that same dynamic extended to how performances were built on set. “Well, they had an on-set head in the last scene where you see it drop in. That was a practical element,” she tells ILM.com. “And then they also had this dummy on rollers that they used, which helped with the interaction and the timing. Everything gelled, both with the client and within the ILM team. We fed off each other, brainstormed ideas, and it created a really fun environment where a lot of great ideas came from.”

From Realistic Animal to Wild Character

At the center of the sequence is the boar, and its shift from realism into exaggeration sets the tone for what follows. The starting point was realism. A believable animal, behaving in a way audiences would recognize. But as the sequence developed, it became clear that realism alone was limiting what the scene could achieve.

“The original idea was a hyperrealistic boar, so we started in a more subdued place,” notes Kayser. That approach quickly gave way to something more expressive once early versions were reviewed. The direction shifted toward aggression, exaggeration, and comic performance.

“As we showed our first takes, the direction became clear – we needed to push it further, and make it more aggressive,” Kayser says. “It was so great to have very clear direction from Sam Raimi. It’s about finding those comedic pauses, at least in animation. It’s all about timing. It’s all about finding those right pauses.”

That timing is what allows the sequence to pivot from tension to release. The boar drops. The audience breathes. Then it rears back up again, taking everything further into excess – with snot, blood, and movement all exaggerated to the point where the violence tips into comedy. Kayser points to the spearing moment as one example of how far the sequence could go.

“I remember when the beast first gets speared. Initially, the way we animated it, we had him just going and running right into the spear, and then Sam Raimi was like, ‘No, you gotta take this much further. We really want to make this funny.’ So we had him literally run at the spear, and he gets lifted off the ground and lands again. It worked. It made it funnier.

“We also started adjusting the model, so it became grittier, dirtier, and more injured,” Kayser adds. “It was interesting to see how it evolved and became increasingly gory.” This shift is crucial. Moving away from strict realism, the team created space for exaggeration, allowing the animation to carry both threat and humor without breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Building Through Collaboration

Many of the sequence’s defining moments didn’t originate from a single department. They emerged through conversation, evolving across reviews as ideas were picked up, challenged, and developed further. In one case, what began as a relatively contained moment of violence quickly escalated into something far more extreme, as each iteration built on the last.

Kayser explains how those ideas would often take shape in discussion before finding their way into the work. “It would be just randomly in these meetings where we talk. At first the gore and violence was actually happening in the ear.”

That initial idea didn’t last long. As the work developed, the team began looking for ways to push the moment further, both visually and tonally. “And then that evolved. She [McAdams] holds onto one ear and starts stabbing the other ear. Well, it had to be even gorier,” Kayser says.

From there, the moment shifted again, moving beyond what had originally been planned. “This whole thing came about with the eye. And Marc was saying, ‘Well, what if we just have the eye kind of pop out and roll down?’” Kayser says.

What followed is a clear example of how the sequence came together across departments, with each layer adding to the final result. “So we integrated that in animation. And then comp started squirting all the blood out,” Kayser explains. “It was really over the top, but it was so fun because there was such a great collaboration with the client and also internally, brainstorming and really trying to go with these ideas and push the envelope.”

Timing the Chaos

For all its intensity, the sequence works because of control. Not control of scale, but control of timing. The humor doesn’t sit outside the action. It is embedded within it, often arriving in the pause before the next escalation. Those pauses give the audience just enough space to catch a breath and process what they’re seeing before the sequence escalates again.

“The comedic side, especially in animation, is all about timing,” says Kayser. “It’s about finding the right pauses.” Those moments are carefully shaped, often by pushing them further than instinct might initially suggest. “Sam would say, ‘Take this much further, we want this to be funny.’”

One moment in particular captures that shift from realism into exaggeration. “I remember thinking it might not play when we had the boar run into the spear, get lifted off the ground, and then land again. But it worked. It made the moment funnier.”

The success of that moment depends on the design of the creature itself. Because it sits slightly outside strict realism, the audience accepts that level of exaggeration. “If the asset had been fully realistic, it might have looked strange,” Kayser notes. “But because it was stylized, we could exaggerate the animation and make it work. Make it over the top and still believable.”

The Audience Test

For all the iteration and refinement, the final measure of the sequence is simple. It either lands with an audience, or it doesn’t. That reaction can’t be simulated in a review or a client call. It only becomes clear when the film is played in front of a crowd. “It’s always fun in the theatre, you get to watch how people react,” says Kayser.

When the sequence played, the response confirmed what the team had been building toward. “I love that moment where the boar kind of dies, and then Linda breathes, and then it cuts to a close-up of her, and then it rears up again and snot continues to fly. Once the scene is finished, you know, there was that moment of release, and everyone started laughing,” says Whitelaw. In that moment, the balance between horror and comedy, realism and exaggeration, finally clicks into place. “I remember thinking, ‘It worked.’ It looked great.”

The Throughline

What runs through the work on Send Help is not just technical craft, but the way that craft is shared. The sequence works because it was shaped across departments, with ideas passed around, refined, and developed by artists working toward the same goal.

For Marc Whitelaw, that collaborative approach is not unique to this project, but something fundamental to how ILM operates. Even on larger productions, where teams are more segmented and timelines tighter, he sees it as the key to unlocking better work. “One of our core principles at ILM is collaboration, and I’d love to see that continue on every project I work on,” he says. “On bigger shows, when teams are trying to hit deadlines, it can be harder to try new ideas and approaches. But whenever there’s an opportunity, it’s one of ILM’s strengths.”

That mindset was particularly evident on Send Help, where the smaller team allowed ideas to move more freely and evolve more quickly. For Whitelaw, it wasn’t just the scale of the work that stood out, but the level of care that went into it at every stage. “The smallest of details never got overlooked,” he explains. “Even things that no one asked for would get improved, just because people wanted it to look as good as it could.”

Kayser sees that same idea on the animation side, but also in terms of what artists take away from working in that environment. For her, one of the defining aspects of ILM is the depth of talent across the studio, and the way each project becomes an opportunity to learn from the people around you. “What’s so great about ILM is the talent that we have here, and every project you learn so much from your peers and your teams,” she says. “And that makes everything better and the product better.”

That shared investment shows up in the work itself. As the sequence developed, details were added and refined across every department, from animation through to fur and compositing, each layer building on the last. “When you have a project like that, and everybody’s motivated and passionate, the work that comes out of it is incredible,” Kayser adds. For her, the eye-stabbing moment stands as the clearest example of that collective effort, where multiple departments contributed ideas that shaped the final result.

“One of the eye-stabbing shots was one of those things, one of those shots that really felt like a shot where every department came together…and came up with these different ideas and details,” says Kayser. “And that’s where ILM is so good and strong.”

In that sense, the sequence becomes more than just a showcase for creature work or spectacle. It reflects a way of working – one where ideas are shared, details are pushed, and the final result is shaped collectively. And in the case of Send Help, that collective push often came down to a simple directive: Go further. Push harder. Kill, kill, kill.

Send Help begins streaming on Hulu on May 7, 2026.

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Jamie Benning is a filmmaker, author, and podcaster with a lifelong passion for sci-fi and fantasy cinema. He hosts The Filmumentaries Podcast, featuring twice-monthly interviews with behind-the-scenes artists. Visit Filmumentaries.com or find him on X (@jamieswb) and @filmumentaries on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

The production visual effects supervisor discusses the Emerald City, Elphaba in flight, and collaborating with Jon M. Chu.

By Mark Newbold

Based on the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by American author Gregory Maguire, the Wicked musical has enchanted audiences worldwide, both on the stage and on the big screen. Maguire’s 1995 novel was not only an adult-oriented version of L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but it was also the first entry in The Wicked Years book series.

With music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman, the stage version of Wicked (or to give it its full title, Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz) premiered on May 28, 2003 at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco and has broken records wherever it has been performed, including over 7,000 performances in London’s West End.

A true phenomenon ripe for further adaptations, director Jon M. Chu’s Wicked landed in cinemas in November 2024. Capturing the imagination of the cinema audience, the final moments of the film promised a sequel, and that promise was kept when Wicked: For Good debuted a year later in November of 2025, continuing the story of Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo), Glinda Upland (Ariana Grande), Fiyero Tigelaar (Jonathan Bailey), the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum), and the people of Oz.

Loaded with sequences of dizzying visual complexity, Industrial Light & Magic was tasked with bringing Chu’s vision to vivid, yellow-bricked life. ILM.com had the opportunity to sit down with the production’s four-time Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman to discuss Wicked: For Good and the task of unveiling even more of Munchkinland, Shiz University, and the Emerald City.

“It was a 155-day shoot for a two-part story,” says Helman. “We thought of Wicked and Wicked: For Good as one movie, and we shot it that way.” That meant intense preparation and planning, given the logistical and technical nature of certain sequences in the films.

“Visual effects can often be challenging because you’re asking the director, the editor, and everybody else to think about things that they normally don’t want to think about,” explains Helman. “A director is thinking of the whole story, but we’re asking them to look at specific sequences because we need to turn over a certain number of shots. They don’t like to be presented with choices because they think they’ve already made their choice, so why present another one? That means they have to rethink, and that takes time.” 

Jon Chu was open to the challenge. “Jon takes an organic approach to filmmaking, he loves having choices and different possibilities,” Helman says. “There might be a script and a plan in place, but the process of making a major motion picture still has plenty of fluidity. “Lots of things change throughout the process of filming, and there are lots of choices to make.”

“It’s a Transactional Thing”

Creative choices are one thing, but a production like Wicked: For Good requires a large amount of preparation and resources, and a sizable portion of those resources are given over to visual effects. As production visual effects supervisor, Helman was deeply involved with practical as well as creative duties.

“Part of my role is managing the project in partnership with my effects producer,” Helman explains. “That includes talent, financials, resources, all kinds of things. So if you’re not thinking ahead, you’re not doing your job. Nobody likes to be in dailies and not be able to say, ‘Yes, I can do this,’ and the only reason you say ‘I can do this’ is because you have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C.” 

Those plans require intense work from the team, gathering as much data as they can. “We have LiDAR [a laser system that scans objects and environments to recreate physical objects and sets as digital models], we have high resolution textures, HDRIs for lighting, all the science behind it, so that when we’re in dailies, I can say ‘Yes, we can do this.’” That preparation is integral to the production. “Nobody likes to be surprised or ambushed. You don’t want to get into those situations, and we never did with Jon. He’s a great communicator and a terrific person. There was never a moment when he was annoyed about anything. For four years on a project, that is an accomplishment.”

Art always comes with the cost of tools, be it the canvas, brushes, and oils a painter uses, or the clay and tools of a sculptor. It’s the same for visual effects artists, but as Helman explains, creativity always leads the discussion.

“The creative stuff that we put together as a team comes first, and after that, you have to be conscious of the resources,” Helman says. “I could go to a producer and say, ‘Look, I know that we’re spending a lot more resources in this section, but I promise that when we get here, I’m going to find a way to get back the resources that we’re putting into this.’ It’s a transactional thing, but it’s all about the storytelling. 

“There’s always a way of doing what is needed for the movie,” Helman continues. “You look at the storytelling and the amount of resources and ask, ‘Is it worth it? Is there a payoff?’” Time and money are challenges for every production, no matter the scale, but Helman believes one is more of a problem than the other. “At some point, you run out of resources, but the resource isn’t money; it’s time, which is finite. You can throw all kinds of money at the problem, but it won’t get done, because it needs more time in the oven. Then it’s not my choice, it’s a choice that we make together.”

 “Every Department Brings Something to the Storytelling”

The work of the visual effects team overlaps with many departments, few more than the special effects team, whose focus is on-set effects like steam, smoke, weather elements, and anything the performers physically touch. Helman gives an example of where the seam between the two lies. “Production design can’t build a 79-story building. They can build 55 feet of it, and then visual effects takes that and develops it, all based on what was done on set.” ILM and their fellow effects houses can expand the world of Wicked, but it only works if the departments are on the same page.

“There’s plenty of discussion about special effects, what can and cannot be done in camera, what’s safe and what’s not,” says Helman. “Filmmaking is one of the most collaborative art disciplines because if you don’t collaborate, you end up with something that is flat. Every department brings something to the storytelling and adds nuance in a way that is individual, surprising, interesting, and curious. So it’s a combination of all those things. There were about 1,000 artists and production crew on these films, and I really would like to thank them because if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be doing this.”

To the Emerald City

The Emerald City is as much a character in both Wicked films as Elphaba, Glinda, Fiyero, Boq (Ethan Slater, aka the Tin Man), Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and The Cowardly Lion (voiced by Colman Domingo). It is the home of the wonderful wizard and the high society of Oz, as well as the underclasses who have to fight for every scrap. Wicked showed us a vast swathe of the city, and Wicked: For Good not only takes us back there, but it takes us into places we’ve not seen before, a task that fell to Helman and his team.

“There were certain parts of Emerald City that we saw in the first part of the story, and certain parts of that we see in the second, so we built different assets for different parts of the story,” explains Helman. “The first movie was a lot more presentational. Things were being set up, and tonally, the movie was lighter, whereas the second one is a lot darker.” That visual change also mirrors the journey of the characters.

“Every character has a specific arc, so in Wicked: For Good, they deal with the consequences of the choices they made in the first film. Part of production design and visual effects is to accompany the performances with the environment,” Helman continues. “The atmospherics are always thick, and the light direction is purposely very dramatic at times. The sun is low, so there’s less light.” Time is also a factor in the progression of the environment. “It’s a combination of things. The clothes and the creatures get used, and the buildings get worn because they went through a specific experience.” He laughs, as he adds with a wink, “When I started the movie, my hair was brown, and now it’s white.”

“We’re Off to See the Wizard”

At the heart of the Wicked films are Elphaba and Glinda, and the second film gave the production the opportunity to delve deeper into the classic characters of L. Frank Baum’s original novel and add a 2025 spin on the characters. 

“It was really exciting,” says Helman. “I remember the first test that we did with Dorothy, Toto, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow. It’s funny because some of the critics were saying that the chronology of the story didn’t do this or that. Well, you know what? It’s a complicated story, and everybody remembers it differently, so I think this is another point of view of that story.”

Based on Gregory Maguire’s novel, which itself presented the story and characters of Baum’s world in a more mature, complicated light, it gave the filmmakers the chance to overlap parallel stories in ways that didn’t step on each other. “It was fun to think about. One thing is right there in the background, but if I come around and go in front, the story is different. It’s an opportunity.”

“Mitigate the Forces of Gravity”

With plenty of experience in making us believe a human, a superpowered dog, or a battered old Corellian freighter can fly, ILM was charged with taking Elphaba into the skies of Oz, a task that required visual effects know-how and a game performer in Cynthia Erivo.

“The approach was always going to be Cynthia doing the flying,” says Helman. “That meant that she needed to mitigate the forces of gravity, no pun intended. She’s singing while trying to get her body to do very specific actions. Cynthia is very strong, but it takes some effort.” 

A willing actor and all the right equipment don’t necessarily mean the results are what is required by the director or the visual effects team. “Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes, because of safety and other things, the actors are not fully exerting themselves, but Cynthia did.” That combination meant that when all was said and done, Elphaba looked even more imposing in the air in the sequel than she did in the first film. “In the arc of the story, she’s proficient. She’s gliding and then stopping. She knows what she’s doing and she’s done it before. She takes time to look at the world under her, and that requires some skill.”

Along with flying, there’s another aspect to the illusion: Elphaba’s cape, one of the most striking elements of her appearance as she heads down a dark path. “Elphaba’s cape isn’t in the cast, but it is a character in the movie, and it does a lot, not only when flying but also landing and taking off,” notes Helman. “Its creation required the skills of two visual effects houses. “ILM and Framestore created it because we couldn’t do a 30-foot-long cape physically.” With practical and visual effects work woven together, parts of the performer were also replaced to create the complete shot, but as Helman explains, “we always used Cynthia’s face and performance.”

Creating the physical cape meant crafting clothing that gives the right look and says something about the character, a challenge the designers went to great lengths to achieve. “The cape has different layers of materials and transparency, but we took some liberties with it,” explains Helman. “We know how difficult it is from doing different capes, from the Vader cape to Superman. The cape says who he or she is.” 

As is often the case, trial and error was the path to finding the right blend. “There was a lot of testing, we did simulations and resins, but at the end of the day, we said let’s forget about the science of it because it’s about the content. It might be scientifically correct, but it doesn’t work if it’s not doing what we need it to do and it’s not correct for the story we’re trying to tell.”

Unlimited Together

Just like its smash-hit predecessor, Wicked: For Good brings together an impressive array of on-screen and off-screen talent, all laser-focused on bringing their utmost in service of making the best film they possibly can. On visual epics like Wicked, visual effects, storytelling, and direction need to be in lockstep.

“There’s a four-minute sequence with this beautiful song that Glinda sings at the beginning of the movie called ‘I Couldn’t Be Happier,’” Helman says. “We redressed Munchkintown, we replaced the sky, the tulips, all kinds of things, but when we looked at it, Jon said ‘We’re missing something because this is a very subtle song.’ Jon said, ‘What if, when she starts singing, the confetti stops?’” 

It’s a striking visual as the confetti hangs motionless in the air, but one that entailed more work than one might imagine. “I asked how long are we doing this for, and Jon said the whole scene. That’s four minutes of really resource-intensive particle work that we didn’t know would work or not, but we had to complete it because we needed to know.” That would require Helman’s most valuable resource: time. “Jon understood that if he wanted to see this, it was going to take weeks to get it. It’s important to have that communication with the director, and to have somebody who understands what we’re doing.”

Magic, Glory, and Love

The ultimate combination of visual effects, performance, direction, production design, and numerous other departments is “The Girl In The Bubble,” written by Stephen Lawrence Schwartz and performed by Ariana Grande. Here we find Glinda in her home, inspired to finally take action following the cyclone that killed Elphaba’s favored sister, Nessarose. It’s a sequence brimming with emotion and meaning, and one that took almost the entire production schedule (that’s both films) to complete.

“We started ‘The Girl in the Bubble’ during the first week of filming on the first movie because it was a very complicated sequence, and we knew that it was going to take us two years. It was a four-minute, continuous shot.” A weighty task, and one that needed to pull in all the eyes it could to make it work. “We did a lot of work with [cinematographer] Alice Brooks and used lots of props before we understood what we needed for the previs.”

It’s one thing to dream up a film sequence, but it’s another to make that dream reality. So with previsualisation underway, Helman and his team also needed to work out the real-world technical aspects of the scene.

“Once we had the previs, then we did a techvis, which meant taking a look at the previs and taking a step back,” Helman continues. “For example, let’s say we previsualize where the camera is moving and, BOOM, there’s a wall in the way, but it’s not a wild wall [meaning it can be easily moved and then put back]. On set, the director might say, ‘Well, move the wall,’ but then you’re wasting two hours of time and resources. Techvis will look at the distance between two points, how fast things will move, and where the blocking is. If you don’t prepare before the shoot, we might put the lens on and find we can’t focus because it’s too close or too far, or the camera doesn’t fit in the space and the director has to change the shot.” 

With the techvis in progress, the team moved to the actual set itself. “We went on set to look at what the camera was doing,” says Helman, “and we realized that when she goes up the stairs, the set would have to be stripped because the camera couldn’t get there. We’d need a 50-foot crane. So we’d have to take the wall out and build a CG set as the camera comes around.” As it was for the entire production, planning in advance was key. “You have to figure these things out beforehand. It’s not necessarily something that a director would look at, but the other departments need that techvis information as well.”

While there was a physical set with props, Helman’s visual effects team added a surprising amount of detail afterward. “The railing is created in computer graphics, everything behind Glinda is created in computer graphics, and once she gets to the closet, only half of the closet was built, so we had to build the reverse of that.” There are even different takes of Grande’s performance brought together for the completed sequence, and that meant more delicate work for the team. “We had performances that were morphed, so the reflections had to match those performances. There were morphs in the middle of it that were very, very difficult, so there was the nuance of doing that.”

Even after completing this technical maze of work and collaboration, changes were still required. “Once we were done, Jon and Myron [Kerstein, editor of Wicked: For Good] changed two performances. We had about seven different plates that needed to be stitched into one, but they changed two of them because they thought the performances were better, so we had to redo the layout. We had all the assets, but then you have to resync everything so that it works.”

That meant the team on the ground needed to be extra vigilant and imaginative to keep the pieces where they needed to be. “The on-set video assist was so important because they needed to play it back and flop it [reverse the image],” Helman explains. “The floppiness of it was mind-boggling, and you have to make sure that you have plenty of imagination because there’s a lot of compositing that goes into the sequence that can’t be done on set in real time. You have to do all the thinking before.” 

Nevertheless, the reward is in the work itself. “It took two years to do, but it was really satisfying,” Helman concludes. “It’s one of the reasons why I love visual effects. It’s that satisfaction, and I realize how lucky I am to have a job that is so creative, because a lot of people don’t.”

Read more about ILM’s work on Wicked here on ILM.com.

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Mark Newbold has written for Star Wars Insider magazine since 2006, ILM.com, Skysound.com, and news site FanthaTracks.com, having previously contributed to StarWars.com and StarTrek.com. He is a 4-time Star Wars Celebration Podcast Stage host, podcasting for over 20 years, and has been involved in websites since 1996. You can find this Hoopy frood @Prefect_Timing.

One of ILM’s first visual effects supervisors looks back at the film’s mix of practical methods and revolutionary digital effects 40 years later.

By Amy Richau

“The game is afoot!”

In 1985, director Barry Levinson and writer Chris Columbus brought a new tale centered around a teenage Sherlock Holmes to audiences with Young Sherlock Holmes. The film’s effects team, led by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, ASC (Star Wars: A New Hope, 1977), that included Kit West (Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981), John Ellis (The Goonies, 1985), and David Allen (Willow, 1988), was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects the following year. The film holds a unique place in Industrial Light & Magic’s history. It includes an abundance of practical visual effects methods the company had developed and perfected over its first ten years, as well as the first fully digital character ever depicted in a feature film, a stained glass knight.

Young Sherlock Holmes arrived in theaters the same year as The Goonies, Cocoon, Explorers, and Back to the Future, when ILM was increasingly working on more projects outside of Lucasfilm. Muren recently spoke to ILM.com about the making of Holmes and its unique mix of old-school and groundbreaking visual effects.

Many of ILM’s biggest breakthroughs occurred during the making of epic blockbusters like Star Wars, The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), or Jurassic Park (1993). However, because Young Sherlock Holmes was a smaller film, it became the perfect vehicle for testing onscreen photoreal computer graphics (CG) effects. Also key was ILM’s proximity at the time to a smaller group ILM founder George Lucas was running a few hundred feet from their offices – the Lucasfilm Computer Division, a portion of which would later become Pixar Animation Studios.

The Height of Practical Effects

The story of Young Sherlock Holmes follows its teenage namesake (Nicholas Rowe) and newly arrived John Watson (Alan Cox) during a year at a London boarding school. The duo discovers a series of mysterious murders that lead them to a secret cult in Victorian London.

The snow that appears in many sequences of the film, which today might be created with CG effects, was accomplished with practical, old-school methods. Kit West, who was in charge of many of the film’s physical effects, needed the snow to both look real and leave no trace after shooting wrapped. West, who died in 2016, told Cinefex that despite filming on location in the United Kingdom at Eton College, Belvoir Castle, and Oxford University during the winter, all of the snow seen in the film was made by the production.

For snow on the ground, West’s team used 150 tons of dendritic salt. Snow on the buildings was made from over 100 tons of magnesium sulfate that had “a glint to it just as real snow,” said West. High-expansion foam that evaporated after about three hours was used in larger areas to mimic snow, while falling snow was made from a biodegradable insulation material that consisted of finely chopped paper, deployed by agricultural grain blowers.

One of the quirkier characters in the film, retired professor Rupert Waxflatter (Nigel Stock), spends much of his time on-screen trying to perfect his flying machine design. Surprisingly, none of the shots of the flying machine in Young Sherlock Holmes include miniatures. West recounted to Cinefex that an aviation company that worked on the film Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines (1965) built a full-scale flying machine with a 25-foot wingspan, which production then tinkered with to make it functional.

Getting the flying machine in the air included two 120-foot cranes. “They were tower cranes,” West told Cinefex, “like those used for building skyscrapers, one on either end of the flight path. We had a stretch cable between them, and the machine was on runners. We attached all our own runners and rails, as well as the raising and lowering mechanisms.”

A Whole New World

One thing was clear from the beginning with Young Sherlock Holmes: Muren and the creative team behind the film wanted the effects to look as photoreal as possible. A challenge that, in the mid 1980s, even Sherlock Holmes could appreciate.

While many of the Computer Division’s projects at the time were focused on animation, Muren wanted to see if their technology could make the jump to photoreal effects. As Muren tells ILM.com, “I just needed to see if this technology had the controls necessary to make something look 100% real or not.” The sequences in Holmes that needed heavy visual effects were mostly split into discrete sections where characters experienced hallucinations, giving Muren the opportunity to use different methods throughout the film.

CG effects had been used in films by ILM before, most notably the Genesis sequence in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982), another collaboration with the Computer Division. But that sequence was intentionally not photoreal, and Muren knew from seeing other tests that in many cases reflections were too high, edges were too sharp, or the shots were missing essential shading and shadows to achieve a more realistic feel.

A CG test done by Triple-I ahead of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) involving five X-wings in flight increased Muren’s desire to play around with this emerging tech. “Triple-I’s test didn’t look photoreal, but they did a camera maneuver with the ship that there’s no way we could have done, and it looked pretty neat,” says Muren. “So it’s another temptation. This thing was out there, and I wanted to get it on a show and figure out how to do it.”

Muren decided to tackle the effects-heavy sequences as a bake-off, doing each one in a different way and seeing if a clear winner emerged. “With the stained glass man, that looks small enough, so let’s try CG, right?” Muren recalls, “If we find out in two months it’s not working, we can back off and do it another way.” For other hallucination sequences, Muren planned to use rod puppets in front of a blue screen and utilize Go-Motion with motion blurs.

Bringing Hallucinations to Life

The hallucinations in the film result from poisonous darts the cult’s leader, Professor Rathe (Anthony Higgins), uses as he seeks revenge against enemies from his past.

In one hallucination sequence that opens the film, an accountant, Bentley Bobster (Patrick Newell), sees his pheasant dinner attack him in a restaurant. After retreating to his home, Bobster sees the serpent handles on his coatrack turn into actual snakes that wrap around him and bite at his face. After the lamps in the room appear to start spitting out fire, Bobster leaps from his window to escape the flames.

In other hallucination sequences later in the film, Professor Waxflatter is attacked by harpy statues in an antique store. His niece, Elizabeth Hardy (Sophie Ward), finds herself fighting off skeletons at the bottom of a grave. Cameraman Michael Owens handled the motion-control programming and lighting for the harpy sequence. The animation was created by Harry Walton with the puppets primarily made by Tom St. Amand.

David Allen supervised the startling hallucination that young Watson experiences in a cemetery, which manages to be equally hilarious and disturbing. After being shot with a toxic dart, the ever-peckish Watson sees a wall of pastries. After he grabs one to eat, it comes to life in his hands and wraps a vine around him, knocking him to the ground. The other pastries soon leap off the shelves and start shoving whipped cream into his mouth.

Muren directed Allen and his crew to use rod puppets to bring these pesky, chaotic, and downright naughty desserts to life. The individual puppets were made of rubber and were approximately eight inches high. Each puppet had rods coming out of their elbows, torsos, heads, and legs with three or four puppeteers moving them in unison. Notes Muren, “Each element was shot in front of a blue screen, so when we combined them, twelve pastries would be in the same shot.” Since each puppet was shot separately, it took two to three days to shoot the eight to twelve pastries that would appear in each shot with Watson.

According to Muren, the pastry sequence in Holmes is a throwback of sorts to the mouse puppet Topo Gigio, who was manipulated by black rods in front of a black background in the early days of television. “It’s all how you angle it,” says Muren, “how you frame the shot. If you shoot the wrong way, you can have a rod go in front of the carrier’s face. So all the performances have to be manipulated to make sure the rods don’t go in front of the figures, or else you’ll see this black thing that will tip off audiences. It’s not using Go-Motion. It was all done by hand and mostly at real speed. I think at times we slowed it down to make it look a little more staccato from what the puppeteers could do. Adding a little more whimsy to it.”

Before sending the shots to the rotoscope department to remove the rods and the puppeteers, they stacked black-and-white footage of the multiple puppets and viewed the scene on a Moviola to make sure the performance had worked out as expected. Shots then went to optical for matting work and printing. “It was complicated. It’s not against black like the spaceships in Star Wars, so it was pretty difficult stuff,” adds Muren.

Six Months for Seven Shots

The Lucasfilm Computer Division, via its graphics group, had previously created a terraforming planet simulation, better known as the “Genesis demo sequence,” for The Wrath of Khan and a CG spinning hologram of the Death Star in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983).

Muren went into the stained glass knight sequence – where a knight jumps out of a stained glass window in a church and walks towards a priest experiencing a hallucination – knowing that creating it digitally may not work. They had to have a backup. And Muren had to sort out how a walking CG character might look. “Should it look like the knight is a walking, full-size, flat glass figure, simply cutout from the window? That didn’t seem very threatening and too literal for a nightmarish hallucination. What if it wasn’t flat but a man-sized three-dimensional glass figure of the knight? Maybe. We also tried some other ideas but nothing really popped.”

The one design that did pop came from Muren’s wife, Zara, who suggested that the knight could jump out of the window in its many individual glass pieces that magically reassemble without touching each other when they land, making something like a hanging mobile but without the strings. Each of the pieces could twist and turn to make up the knight’s figure which could be moved and animated as one menacing figure.

To make the knight even more menacing, Muren asked the visual effects artists to make each piece of glass of an inch thick with sharp jagged edges. Some of the pieces were bowed in the middle, convex pushing out from behind, so they were domed and coming towards the priest, making it appear more aggressive. “Everything in movies is feelings,” notes Muren. “And if I didn’t feel it, and the audience didn’t feel it, then you’re just telling a story, and you might as well be doing it by telephone.”

This was all done before shading and motion blur in CG shots were the norm, and Muren leaned on the fact that the knight was a hallucination, so it didn’t have to be as real-looking as ships flying through space. The seven shots of the knight took about six months to complete and included some of the first digital composites.

“George’s graphics group had been making an input-output scanner as a prototype,” said Muren, “and that was so troublesome because it was so cutting-edge that it would often break down unexpectedly. I think out of every input scan, it was 10 or more times before it would make it through as few as 120 frames.”

The entire knight sequence lasts less than a minute in the finished film. It starts with a wide shot showing the church’s stained glass window bowing a bit before the knight breaks out and lands on the ground. While many traditional matte paintings made with oil paints were used in Young Sherlock Holmes to recreate exteriors of Victorian London and a pyramid temple, for the opening shot of the knight sequence, matte artist Chris Evans created the first CG image used as a film background. “I remember,” says Muren, “it took him a really long time to do it because the tools were so hard to use. The paint program was in existence, but it was very slow to use, to be able to paint and get the brush strokes right.”

After breaking out of the window, the knight’s 100-plus pieces reassemble as he lands on his feet, holding up a large sword. The next few shots depict the knight walking menacingly towards the priest. As the knight walks past the camera, audiences can see through the backside of the knight’s glass.

“It was all shot very traditionally,” explains Muren. “I shot a lot of plate backgrounds of the church.” In addition to footage of the priest, the location also had several candles and mist. When Muren returned from shooting, he still wasn’t sure exactly how they were going to pull this off or if it was going to work at all. “It could all hit a limit where the blacks or the whites never match. There were all sorts of things that could go wrong. I didn’t know what was going to work and what wasn’t. So I shot for any technique we were going to use.”

The next step in the process was getting the digital technicians to constrain their tools to what the eye sees on film. “A lot of what’s made for software manipulation, whether it’s brightness, camera movements, or distance, go to infinity,” said Muren. “So part of the process is constraining it down to what film records. We don’t want to go above or below what film records as black and white, even though the software could go beyond that. When it is constrained to the world of photography, then I can start to understand it again.”

Muren and his team also “cheated” what audiences saw through the glass of the knight at times. “What you see through the glass, let’s say a yellow piece of the knight, is brightening up the color that’s on the glass, not what you would really see if you held up all those color pieces where parts of the background of a yellow piece were blue and yellow. That would appear grey, which would take you out of the drama of the scene. So the whole transmission through the glass, what you see on the other side, is black and white. You can’t tell because it’s got this yellow, but it’s a cheat, just black and white to light it up. We did a lot of that later in The Abyss with the water snake, all the refractions in the rooms, we cheated all the way through.”

All About the Blur

A key element to achieving realism in the stained glass knight sequence was understanding the importance of motion blur, where objects on-screen shot at 24 frames per second appear blurry as they are in motion. The problem was that at the time, ILM had yet to develop the ability to digitally render blurs. “We’re used to what those blurs look like,” says Muren. “They make things look fluid. That’s very important for an effect to look real because the rest of the movie has got that in it. I didn’t want the stained glass knight to look like it came from ILM, that it was stuck onto the background.”

To help achieve the blur effect, every frame in the knight sequence was rendered nine times in slightly different positions. As the render time in 1985 was so long, one primary frame would be rendered at a higher resolution than the rest to save time. The result was a blur made up of a number of static pictures. “So you put them all together, and you’re doing this 24 times a second, and each of these blurs has eight pictures in it that are kind of similar, but some are weaker on the outside, and some are strong in the middle – then it all looks like a normal blur.”

This experience pushed Muren and the Lucasfilm Computer Division to learn more and create the tools to execute their vision for the finished shots. “It was an introduction to them and to me,” explains Muren, “about what you could do. Motion blur, overexposure, underexposure, tracking or hanging the camera around. I hadn’t really thought about how you have to track the camera with the background. For a camera guy like me, who understands filmmaking technically, I could go in there and say, ‘Can we get this tool?’ ‘We need that one too.’ And they would 99% or 100% of the time come up with it in either hours, or they already had it, and they just adjusted something, or they could write something for it, within a few days.”

A Wealth of New Tricks and Tools

It’s almost impossible to list all of the innovations and challenges the Young Sherlock Holmes effects crew faced during postproduction. The film not only includes the first CG character but also broke ground in developing digital matte paintings and digital compositing. In order for ILM artists to match camera movements from the live-action set into a computer’s 3D space, they projected footage shot on location in England with gridlines over it onto a computer screen. A new preview system gave creators the chance to work with a simple black-and-white wireframe of an image, so they didn’t have to wait for an image to be completely rendered to continue working on the shot.

To record the computer animation back to film, a laser scanner was used that could only print approximately one frame a minute, so each second of footage would take 24 minutes to complete. “I don’t think I rendered anything at 4K or even scanned it out because it was just taking too long,” recalls Muren. “We just did everything at either 1 or 2K. At least the tool was able to change and wasn’t locked into 4K, or we’d still be working on the film today.”

Among the most challenging shots to finish in the film was a panning shot of the knight coming toward the audience. “I think John [Lasseter] came up with the idea of panning the camera,” says Muren. “I didn’t even know if we could match the camera’s pan in the computer. When we shot it, I had somebody walk by and the operator followed as a reference. Then they shot the actual plate without the person in there. It took a while to get that, but it wasn’t hard once we figured out we could do it. It was somebody trying to track it manually every frame in 3D space because we didn’t want the stained glass knight to be locked into a candle that’s seven feet farther back. It had to be locked into them, closer to the camera.”

The final shot was a side view of the priest and the knight raising his sword above his head in a threatening way. Muren asked engineer Bill Reeves if they could add a glint of light to the sword blade for a dramatic end to the shot. “They didn’t know how to do that, how to put a light to reflect a certain thing, but they had all of the spatial information.” Muren suggested they track the shot backward, look at where the camera was, the angle of the sword, and then put a digital light there. “No one’s going to know that you cheated that light and it didn’t take a lot of time,” explains Muren. “That’s what we always do in moviemaking. What you care about is what the camera sees.”

Shortly after Holmes hit theaters, the Lucasfilm Computer Division was spun off into two pieces – one half funded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs as Pixar, the other half as the digital editing company known as DroidWorks. In Young Sherlock Holmes’s 1 hour and 49 minute running time, ILM artists used just about every tool they had access to at the time, including a few newly invented ones. The seeds planted during their effects work would pay off in the ensuing years with a computer-generated water creature in The Abyss, the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the latter directed by one of Holmes’s executive producers, Steven Spielberg.

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Amy Richau is a freelance writer and editor with a background in film preservation. She’s the author of several pop culture reference books including Star Wars Timelines, LEGO Marvel Visual Dictionary, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace: A Visual Archive. She is also the founder of the 365 Star Wars Women Project – that includes over 90 interviews with women who have worked on Star Wars productions. Find her on Bluesky or Instagram.

ILM.com is showcasing artwork specially chosen by members of the ILM Art Department. In this installment of a continuing series, four artists from the San Francisco, Vancouver, and London studios share insights about their work on the 2025 Netflix production, The Eternaut.

Supervising Art Director Fred Palacio

During pre-production, one of the key ideas here was to show how the characters were trapped in the city, isolated from the external world. The snow here is the first lethal weapon that killed most of the population, but something else is happening. A barricade along the Puente Saavedra shows that something else is happening, something more extraordinary. This keyframe shows the character isolated against all the odds, the snow, the loneliness, the urban chaos. 

One of the most important things working on the project was to have the vision of the people who live there when this is happening. The Client and the novelist were from Argentina where the film is played. So the first step for authenticity was to become immersed in the Argentinian world. Diving into memories of the city I visited and merging with an exact location, walking through street views online. Finally, translating the situation into a frame, one by isolating the character, but also using the bridge to undermine his power, the point of view and camera position is determinant to sell the situation of the character. 

The resilience to overcome the giant wall made of all sorts of human-made things to suggest the Alien presence, even the sign in the bridge is a message to the viewer translating “everything has a prelude.” The element here needs to reflect how an ordinary man in an ordinary world resists all the extraordinary events and obstacles. The green bag means a forward action, the red light tells not to go back, the perspective of the bridge points back to the car and another figure hinting to cohesion…all these elements tell something about the story but also about the character’s attitude toward those obstacles.

Art Director Amy Beth Christenson

This is an early study for a specific neighborhood in Buenos Aires, just after the snowfall, where Juan is discovering the aftermath. I worked to position cars and people so that it conveyed a sense that what happened was sudden and unexpected. I researched the original comic quite a bit, and also did a lot of research to make sure that the specific neighborhood was accurate so that it felt very real.

I like the sense of a rosy pre-dawn, almost peacefulness to the scene, which is a contrast to what has happened. Looking at the day-to-day life images of people, and thinking about what it would look like if they were taken mid-stride, gave me ideas, like a woman walking her dog, people carrying groceries, etc., which helped the images feel more eerie.

I was on the project just for the very early initial concepts, specific to the immediate aftermath of the snowfall, and what those moments might look and feel like, and didn’t iterate beyond these. At these early stages, I wanted to get ideas for lighting and composition down early, and worry about details later.

Art Director Tyler Scarlet

This piece depicts alien creatures that are about two feet tall and who can work in a pack. The client really liked the look of microscopic dust mites, so I used that as a starting point and expanded from there. They responded to different elements from my first round, so I worked on combining the hard-shelled version with one that looked similar to a dust mite. The next step was to show it in action. I explored concepts of it attacking people, wrapping bodies in its web, and dragging them away. They are also scavengers so I did an illustration showing that as well. 

For the first pass I wanted to give the client a range of different types of creatures while still fitting the brief of a six-limbed dust mite-like creature. One version was very close to a realistic, large dust mite, another version had a hard shell, jointed legs and claws at the end of its limbs to grip onto its prey, and the third version was more aerodynamic and looked like it was built to move fast. I like how it looks when it’s coiling its web around its victim! [laughs]

This client was one of my favorites I have worked with. They came to every meeting with such excitement, passion, and appreciation. 

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See the complete gallery of concept art from The Eternaut here on ILM.com.

Learn more about the ILM Art Department.