San Francisco News Archives | Industrial Light & Magic

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.

The actor who voiced and supplied the motion capture performance for Volo Bolus discusses their collaboration with ILM for the mixed reality playset.

By Jay Stobie

In Star Wars: Beyond Victory – A Mixed Reality Playset’s Adventure Mode, players follow the journey of up-and-coming podracer Volo Bolus, whose plight to become famous leads them to team up with the infamous Sebulba. ILM.com sat down with actor Fin Argus, who voiced and provided the motion capture performance for Volo Bolus, to learn more about their approach to portraying the character, their time collaborating with Industrial Light & Magic, their thoughts on the interactive gameplay experience, and much more.

A Star Wars Story

Argus’s zest for Star Wars stretches back as long as they can remember, with cherished memories ranging from watching their original trilogy gold VHS box set to carrying around a Darth Vader backpack filled with figurines. “I also dressed as Jar Jar Binks in my preschool’s costume contest for Halloween, and I was robbed,” Argus jokes. “The first video game I ever completed was, in fact, LEGO Star Wars, and it’s still one of my favorites. Star Wars was the first fantasy world I fell in love with. It is epic and vast, and I was convinced that I was destined to be a Jedi. Joke’s on me – I was actually destined to be a podracer!”

When Argus finally had the opportunity to audition to become that podracer, the information they were provided about Volo Bolus was understandably limited. “Such is the nature of the things for stories as huge as Star Wars,” Argus relays. “All I knew is they were a non-binary podracer with a good sense of humor. Part of the audition scene was just the directive: ‘Act like you’re working on things like an engine,’ so I grabbed a spatula and ladle and started banging them around in my living room. I’d say that’s the energy I honed in on for the whole of the project: just some kid banging spatulas together hoping something great comes of it!”

Motion Capture Magic

Once they landed the role, Argus dove right into the motion capture process at Industrial Light & Magic. “I was brand new to the mo-cap world, so I learned on the job. Luckily, I was with a team of seasoned professionals who made it fun and easy. I got into my little outfit, which is a skin tight body suit. Then I get velcroed in from the outside while people add reflective balls to any point on my body that has a joint so they can track my body movements in the studio.

“I also had to wear bright red lipstick so the camera that pointed directly at my face from the helmet they put on me could make out the contrast of my lips to use for the animators to add on to my character design,” Argus explains. “We then go through a series of motions on the stage, almost like an aerobics class, that calibrates my avatar with my own body. There’s a ‘magic mirror’ that then shows you your character design reflected back to you – that’s where I practiced my character’s ‘walk’ and learned how long Volo’s limbs are so I could reach for objects in the mo-cap world accurately. Learning the dimensions of my new body was the hardest part of the job for me, but by the end of the first week it was second nature. After that, it was off to the races!”

Argus’s favorite element of the motion capture work involved collaborating on setbuilding scenes with multiple actors. “There’s a scene where I hop up onto Sebulba’s ship to join his crew and pilot for them. Our team had to build a multi-level structure of perfect proportions so the dimensions of our characters’ bodies fit perfectly on the ‘ship’ and still allowed my character’s movement to look natural,” Argus declares. “It makes so much sense in retrospect, but I was surprised to learn that, because all of our characters are such different sizes, we as actors had to interact with the set very differently to make our characters land in the right locations. For example, for two actors in the same scene, the cockpit of the ship could be in totally different locations on the stage, because our characters are different sizes, relatively speaking.”

Volo’s Voice and Movements

When it came to developing Volo Bolus’s voice, Argus harnessed their younger years for inspiration. “Their voice is basically just me as a teenager! A little more animated than I am in everyday life, but the game is still very much grounded. I just got to tap into how a younger version of myself would speak and react in those situations, while hanging on to that sense of humor to cope with all the chaos that ensues for them,” Argus outlines.

As far as their four-armed character’s movements, Argus lightheartedly proclaims that “with all respect, Volo and I are both pretty gangly, and I leaned into the floppiness of my arm movements to highlight their youthfulness and draw attention to their four arms. How fun is having four arms? Very,” Argus quips.

“I didn’t have to worry too much about the second pair of arms, as those were controlled entirely by animation. I only controlled the top two, which I guess you could say are Volo’s ‘dominant arms.’ The bottom two were mainly doing auxiliary tasks or in use while piloting when every single arm had a job to do at once. I would say the most I thought about having four arms is when I was imagining all the very specific choreography they could do. I hope I can test this theory someday, but I think it would be very hard to beat Volo in a dance battle.”

An ILM Experience

Speaking on their time collaborating with ILM, Argus credits their colleagues for creating such a special experience. “A huge shout out to [Beyond Victory director] Jose Perez III for his direction and the passion he brought to the project,” the actor says. “He set a tone of excitement and drive that kept everyone on set happy to be there, and to tell the story. [Writer] Ross Beeley turned out an amazing script and kept us focused on the heart of the story throughout a process where we had to jump around and film different parts of the story,

“Big shoutout to [motion capture performer] Nathan Camp for not only delivering a sensational performance as Coy Vrizh, but also as so many other characters for mo-cap. He taught me and a lot of other actors how to navigate mo-cap performances with so much kindness and patience,” Argus continues. “The ILM team is a dream to work with every step of the way, and I feel lucky to have done my first video game with such an all-star group of creatives and professionals.”

From Performer to Player

Given Argus’ dedication to their craft and enthusiasm for all things Star Wars, it’s no surprise that they took Beyond Victory for a test drive as soon as it was available on Meta Quest. “I was so blown away by the immersiveness and game mechanics. It was strange hearing my own voice in my ears and seeing the game from ‘my own’ perspective, but as the character. It felt nostalgic, like I was reliving the filming experience but peeling back the layers to see the reality of what we were making. It felt like watching a dream come true in real time,” Argus beams. “I’m still not over it, and I probably never will be.”

Argus takes great joy in their character, revealing, “Volo is a total sweetheart and goofball, but I think I may have brought a slight edge to them through my performance. Maybe ‘sass’ is a better word, actually?” The actor also admits that their initial playthrough of Beyond Victory might have been forever enshrined, as “I’m pretty sure my friends have a video of me playing for the first time and jumping up and down, screaming, when I first heard and saw Volo within the game.”

For as grand in scope as the Star Wars galaxy is, Argus ultimately believes that the slightest details are what truly stand out, observing, “It may sound a little silly, but I’m most proud of seeing the really specific things come to life: like a shot where I had to open a dumpster to a jump scare of a droid popping out. When we filmed, it was tough to get the placement of my hand and timing of the reaction just right, so seeing those moments of attention to detail pay off to create such an immersive, exciting, and beautiful game makes me so proud of the entire Star Wars: Beyond Victory team, and I hope we get to do it again!”

On Meta Quest, dive into three unforgettable adventures with Vader Immortal, Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge and Star Wars: Beyond Victory — A Mixed Reality Playset, each 50% off, or get all three together for $30 from April 28 to May 5.

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Read more about Star Wars: Beyond Victory here on ILM.com:

Bobby Moynihan Takes Us Behind the Scenes of ‘Star Wars: Beyond Victory’

Inside the ILM Art Department: ‘Star Wars: Beyond Victory’

‘Star Wars: Beyond Victory’ Now Available and Director Jose Perez III Takes Us Behind the Scenes

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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.”

Director Sam Raimi and actor Rachel McAdams (Photo by Brook Rushton © 2025 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved).

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.”

The practical boar puppet used live on the set (Photo by Brook Rushton © 2025 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved).

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.”

Sam Raimi studies the production’s storyboards while on location (Photo by Brook Rushton © 2025 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved).

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 team joins their Lucasfilm counterparts in the win for Special, Visual and Graphic Effects.

Last night at the BAFTA TV Craft Awards in London, the team from Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm took home the win for Special, Visual and Graphic Effects for their work on the second season of Andor.

Lucasfilm’s vice president of visual effects TJ Falls accepted alongside fellow winners, including production visual effects supervisor Mohen Leo and ILM visual effects supervisor Scott Pritchard. Along with ILM as a whole, the other individual recipients included special effects supervisor Luke Murphy, creature and droid effects supervisor Neal Scanlan, and senior digital colorist Jean-Clément Soret.

Congratulations to all of our ILM and Lucasfilm winners!

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Art Director Tyler Scarlet

We wanted to give the bison a whimsical look so I played around with stylizing their fur to give them facial hair as well as to exaggerate the shape of their horns. I also wanted to humanize them a bit so I worked on the shape of their eyes and exaggerated their eyebrows to be more expressive.

Since the Bison were forced to work against their will, we wanted to show some signs of injury. I worked on finding the right amount of scaring, bruising, etc. Some of my early versions went too far and looked a little too sad so I had to pull that back a bit and find the right balance. I really enjoyed exaggerating their different personalities.

Art Director Chris Voy

This image is part of a series for the sequence where we follow the train from the Ozian countryside and see how Glinda’s influence sweeps through the Emerald City, which is represented by her characteristic pink color in flags, streamers, and confetti. This shot shows the banners unfurling from the tall towers with the train crossing the river in the distance. Later the train’s color was switched to pink.

Across both films are several wide establishing shots of the Emerald City. They are usually from different angles and show something new in the story. For each of these we’d design and build out a bit more to fill in the gaps. On the first film I put some time (maybe too much!) into figuring out a layout for the little Ozian gardens and streets, but you never really got a chance to see any of it very well. Fortunately the second film added this epic tower-view shot where we see right down into the surrounding city where all those little details are on display.

This sequence shows several new parts of the city along with areas that the audience would hopefully recognize from the first film. Of course, everything needed to be consistent from shot to shot as we traveled from the countryside up through the center of the city. I did some rough sketches to discuss ideas but it became necessary to keep most of the work in 3D to ensure it all fit together with existing parts of the city and worked from the perspective of each shot. Then I was able to pass that geometry on for use in the shot.

Concept Artist Mathilde Marion

We wanted to offer some visuals for a forest sequence in which Elphaba is being chased by the flying monkeys. We had some plates but were worried that it was not going to look Ozian enough and that we would need to either augment or replace them. So the main point was to build an environment that would feel Ozian, all the while respecting the fast-pace and the tension of a chase sequence.

We used the previs as a base, choosing the shots that seemed to be the most important story-wise and that could best describe the environment. I started painting them as black and white thumbnails to make sure I’d stay visually consistent through the sequence. Once that was done, we picked a couple that we wanted to build up to a fully finished concept. These were to go along with the thumbnails to sell the look and atmosphere to the client. The main challenge was with how fast the chase was. Visually, it had to be striking enough that it would immediately appear as part of the magical land of Oz. In order to do that, we relied on the strange shapes of the twisted Ozian trees, and created a magical atmosphere through color and lighting.

A lot of great production design work had already been done on the first movie. I used that and the sets as a starting point, and then did some more reference gathering. There are many interesting images in landscape photography, with locations like Broceliande’s forest in France, or the goblin forest in New Zealand. Photographs in the morning fog, with a very diffuse bright lighting, were the ones that talked to me the most.

See the complete gallery of concept art from Wicked: For Good here on ILM.com.

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Twin Pines Mall

“The professor is talking and suddenly he grabs Marty and starts to spin him out of the way of the camera,” Ralston explained to American Cinematographer. “That’s all blue screen. The actors were blue screened separately from the background. We pan off as the car is forming and skids into the shot and spins around, then it’s frozen as it comes back into the present. That was certainly one of the better blue screen things.”

Ralston continued with Cinefex. “There were lots of little tiny details that no one ever sees. The time slice shots are quick, but that makes them work nicely, too. They don’t feel like effects shots, just kind of like ‘wham’ and suddenly the thing’s going. Bob never wanted the audience to get ahead of what his gags were. He never wanted you to be able to think about what was happening, he wanted the car gone by the time you had figured it all out.”

Forty years later, Dean Cundey thinks back to ILM’s approach, a mindset that has remained consistent for over half a century.

“ILM were so great at finding new ways and even old ways that had been pioneered back in the earliest days of filmmaking, but embellishing and improving it so that it became even more believable. It fooled you completely.”

The Clock Tower

Towards the conclusion of the film, as Doc struggles to ensure Marty returns to 1985, we find Doc hanging off a cable attached to the Hill Valley Clock Tower, waiting for the inevitable bolt of lightning that would strike at 10:04 p.m. on November 12, 1955. Filmed on the Universal backlot on a set designed by production designer Lawrence G. Paull and his crew, Wes Takahashi and ILM’s animation department created the bolts of lightning, something that carried huge expectations.

“The script had called for ‘the largest bolt of lightning in cinematic history,’” explained Takahashi to Cinefex. “It was initially intended that the bolt should last for over a hundred frames, but to have the thing flash over any length of time makes it clear that the shot is obviously animated.”

It was Zemeckis who found the solution, identifying a specific frame from the lightning footage and describing to Takahashi how he wanted the strike to look, “to travel in this S-shape and hit.” And hit it did, landing cinema’s most famous lightning strike.

The Final Scene

Combining live-action filmed in Arleta, California, miniature work by veteran modelmaker Steve Gawley (with Ira Keeler, Mike Fullmer, and anyone else available to pitch in), ILM’s visual effects, and the cinematography of Dean Cundey, the DeLorean’s flight into 2015 left audiences hungry for more. Steve Gawley explained to Cinefex the process for bringing that model to life and making it fly.

“Because we didn’t have any existing model kits to use, the entire car was built from scratch. We had looked into an eighth-scale Corvette model and perhaps using its tires, but we decided that wasn’t going to work either. So we ultimately built our own model, which turned out to be one-fifth scale of a real DeLorean – about 32 inches – and used the photographs we got from the existing stunt car for reference.”

The marriage between background plates shot on ILM’s VistaCruiser motion-control camera system in a windy Arleta, and the ILM model was a hefty undertaking, especially given the less-than-direct route the crane was required to go.

Matching the crane shot was straightforward enough, but plotting out where the car would be in a specific frame required plotting out the move with graph paper on a Movieola and lining up all the points, a process that stretched the rig to its capacity. With the car completely turning around and accelerating back towards the camera, it had to be mounted so audiences never lost sight of the car, right up to the moment it leaps through time towards 2015.

Animator Ellen Lichtwardt explained to Cinefex the intense work that went into that final shot of the DeLorean passing under the trees of Lyon Drive. “About ten people from rotoscope and animation worked day and night on it for about a week, and that was aside from the motion control work.”

With all of these elements brought together for a shot no one would ever forget, there was still time for an 11th-hour idea from Zemeckis to be added in, as Ralston explained to American Cinematographer.

“At the last moment, Bob Zemeckis thought it would be funny to put a little turn signal on the car when it goes back and does the turnaround. I don’t know if anyone sees it, but it’s there – a little tiny thing blinking on and off. It was done in animation because we didn’t have that when the scene was shot.”

The final completed shot was taken from the lab and printed, without the shadows of the trees being added to the car as it flew under them, despite Ralston and his team having the assets to complete the shot. As is often the case, time was the enemy.

Looking back, Dean Cundey remembers the end sequence well. “Ken Ralston came to us one day and said, ‘We think we can make this DeLorean fly, here’s what we’re going to do. Put it on cables, and then we’re going to remove the cables.’ He talked a little bit about it, shooting the shot twice and all of that, but the first film was about the storytelling, as opposed to the effects.”

In terms of ILM matching their miniature photography to the onset look Cundey had established, there was constant collaboration. “I was always interested and paid a lot of attention to the techniques and the technology that ILM was creating, and did my best to understand or keep abreast of the creations that were happening, so it was very much a two-way street of me understanding and then talking to the ILM people that were involved to understand the technology and their techniques. For example, I didn’t have to know how to run an optical printer, but I would understand its purpose.”

The Post-Production Rush

Modelmaker Ira Keeler at work on a wooden sculpture of the DeLorean that would be used as a mould for the final miniature (Credit: ILM & Universal).

With the film in the can and visual effects work well underway, the comparatively brief but ultimately very efficient post-production period began, with all corners of the production racing to assemble this time-shifting jigsaw puzzle in time to arrive at the film’s release on July 3, 1985. That meant all hands to the pump, even hands belonging to former key ILM team members, like post-production supervisor Art Repola, who’d started at ILM as a production coordinator. With a tight turnaround, the team had roughly eight weeks to complete the film after principal photography wrapped.

Ken Ralston remembered that even more brutal schedule, speaking with American Cinematographer. “They cut about two weeks out of our schedule because they moved up the release date. They handed out thousands of those buttons, “On July 19 we’re going BACK TO THE FUTURE,” but it was really July 3! So we killed ourselves for a few days getting the thing shot.”

Cundey fondly remembers his association with ILM, which also included his part in a monumental leap forward in visual effects on Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). “I really enjoyed working with ILM so often because they’re the people who are most interested in furthering the illusion that cinema could do. If you look at my filmography with ILM, so much of it is all about finding new ways to create the illusion.”

Cundey gives insight into how he explains the collaborative process to film students eager to inhale any knowledge they can from the industry veteran.

“I often say to film students, you can have a canvas and oils, go in your garage and create by yourself, or sit in front of your typewriter and write a novel by yourself, but when you get into feature films, it’s a huge collaboration, it’s one of the artforms that requires a great number of people and visions. You hope that the substance of it – the story, the plot and the characters – are good, and that this ensemble of skilled and talented and hardworking people can contribute and bring together these separate visions under the guidance of the director.”

Modelmaker Steve Gawley at work on the DeLorean with its futuristic upgrades (Credit: ILM & Universal).

Back to the Future’s sense of legacy and of making a film of substance was something Cundey was aware of during its production. He also treated it as a learning experience in a career that began over 50 years ago.

“You hope that what you’re working on at the moment is going to be a great success, and you always approach it that way,” he remembers. “Back to the Future was such a unique story, and with Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, you had such a great set of characters. I thought, ‘We’re really on to something interesting and unique here,’ and here we are 40 years later with so many people still engaged.

“I don’t know how many times I go somewhere and someone says, ‘Oh my gosh, Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies,’” Cundey says. “I just showed it to my kids. They’re passing on this tradition, this adventure, and even though it’s set in a particular time and place where 1955 was the past, well, 1985, that’s the past too, even though it was supposed to be the present when it first came out. They’re willing to overlook the fact that they’re looking at 1985 because there’s something about the characters, the situations, the places that still apply. People can empathize with it.”

Ultimately, as with all great films, be they financial and cultural smashes or overlooked gems, cinema is the canvas that creatives like Cundey, Zemeckis, and the artists at ILM paint on, along with numerous other cast and crew. It’s a magic trick, an illusion not unlike ones found inside that “little magic set” Cundey was gifted for Christmas all those years ago.“

When you think about it, you go into a big room and in front of you is a flat white wall. Then they project moving images on it that so many people have been part of creating, and hopefully the audience get so immersed that they believe what they’re watching. Then, when the film is over, the white wall comes back, and they leave having experienced this magical, intangible thing. Hundreds of people are involved, from the early writing and pre-production through production, post-production, all bringing their best to make that intangible thing. That’s the thing about Back to the Future. The believability of the illusion is there, so people continue to follow it.”

The DeLorean miniature is photographed by ILM’s Vista Cruiser motion-control camera system (Credit: ILM & Universal).

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Mark Newbold contributed to Star Wars Insider magazine for twenty years, is a 4-time Star Wars Celebration stage host, avid podcaster, and the Editor-in-Chief of FanthaTracks.com. Online since 1996. You can find this Hoopy frood online @Prefect_Timing.

The ILM visual effects supervisor discusses helping craft the world…and the Creature…of Frankenstein for the Netflix production.

By Mark Newbold and Jay Stobie

Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, Netflix’s Frankenstein (2025) delivers a vibrant take on Mary Shelley’s classic story, with Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi supplying masterful performances in their respective roles as Dr. Victor Frankenstein and The Creature. Industrial Light & Magic’s visual effects contributions to the film were overseen by ILM visual effects supervisor Ivan Busquets (Bumblebee [2018]; The Irishman [2019]; Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom [2023]), who sat down with ILM.com to reflect on his work, from the real-world references used to create Frankenstein’s environments and animals, to utilizing visual effects as a way to supplement the film’s practical elements, and much more.

Frankenstein’s ‘Filmscape’

“ILM was one of the two main visual effects vendors on the show, alongside MR. X,” Busquets tells ILM.com. “ILM was assigned around 200 shots, primarily dealing with some of the icescape sequences at the beginning and end of the movie, as well as a lot of the creature work, both for The Creature itself and also the deer, wolves, and mice.” While a portion of the mouse shots were handled by ILM’s Mumbai studio, the vast majority of the work was split between the Vancouver and San Francisco studios. “Logistically, being in the same time zone made sharing work seamless. As long as we were in the same time zone, it didn’t matter whether we were in one location or the other.”

Busquets began his tenure on Frankenstein in August 2023 in preliminary meetings with Guillermo del Toro and production visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi. “We were lucky to have an asset early on – production provided ILM with what they called the ‘filmscape,’ a document compiled by their production design department,” Busquets recalls. “Created by production designer Tamara Deverell and her team, the filmscape featured everything from location references to artwork, sketches, and even storyboards. From the early stages, we had access to that visual reference, whether it was for sequences that we were going to be working on or others. It supplied an exceptional overview of the movie’s style.”

The filmscape provided ILM with an idea of the final image the filmmakers sought, leading Busquets to praise the director and his team, emphasizing, “In terms of tasking and determining what would be required of ILM, the filmscape was super valuable. Oftentimes, when we’re prepping, in the absence of a document like that, what we’d normally do is go out and find real-world references for the sequences we set out to do.” Although ILM did gather such references for this project, the filmscape expedited the process. “For example, we had the Carpathian Alps environment around the millhouse where The Creature stays. We could’ve scouted a location or photographed mountains, but Guillermo gave us references of landscape painters like Albert Bierstadt. While we based our matte paintings on real photography, we started by studying what Guillermo liked about the filmscape’s visual references.”

Creature Features

ILM’s depiction of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) was a seminal moment in visual effects history, presenting the capacity to create authentic animals that would delight audiences. The challenge of organic elements like fur and feathers was still beyond early 1990s technology. Jumanji (1995) saw the first computer graphics photo-realistic hair and fur, bringing lions and monkeys to life as they stampeded through Joe Johnston’s classic adventure film. As the tech and their mastery of these elements developed, ILM was able to bring creatures from this world and beyond to the screen, crafting a menagerie of wildlife that would dazzle even the great John Hammond. For Frankenstein, ILM was tasked with bringing a trio of very real animals to life, and as Busquets explains, that took some work.

“There’s a wolf trainer in Alberta called Andrew Simpson, who’s worked extensively in the industry. The production cast seven wolves to be the pack in the movie, and myself and ILM animation supervisor Adrian Millington went to his ranch during preproduction to gather photographic and video reference of the wolves.

“They trained the wolves for months to do specific actions,” Busquets continues, “so the whole scene had been prepped and blocked for the choreography of the fight. We had the advantage of not only taking high-resolution close-ups of fur, teeth, and claws, but also to film them performing those actions while they were training.”

In parallel with this intense training period for the wolves, the ILM team “always knew there was a percentage of those wolves that would become CG,” as Busquets explains. “But the real wolves were able to actually perform those actions, so we had the perfect reference from the real world.”

The menagerie extends beyond the wolves’ feral nature. Other animals encounter The Creature in the snow-covered woods, and just as the lupine ferocity of the wolves had been studied, so was the gentle nature of the inquisitive mice and deer.

“The approach to both was a little bit different,” explains Busquets. “We always knew there was going to be a deer in there, but in pure Guillermo fashion, it couldn’t be just any deer. He brought in a deer from a taxidermy artist that he loves and trusts.” Truly, the film was stuffed with granular detail. “It had to be that species of deer. It essentially became the perfect reference that we could have on set for lighting, likeness, and everything.”

They had their del Toro-approved cervine muse. Now the task turned to bringing it back to life. “Our task was to create a digital version of it and animate it. Guillermo was so detailed in describing the deer that he wanted that even in early conversations, he had pushed us to consider the idea of using some part of the puppet in the movie.” An interesting request, but one that ultimately didn’t happen. “In the end, it was more practical for us to match it closely and replace the whole thing. That’s how specific he was about it.”

In Frankenstein, the mice are a charming curiosity, but their creation was very much after-the-fact, as Busquets explains. “The mice weren’t an afterthought, but they were a later addition. They didn’t exist in the script, but as the movie evolved, Guillermo listened to what the movie was asking for, and he felt he needed to add something to the arc of The Creature to show his connection to nature. Nature isn’t afraid of him, even though humans are.”

Added in postproduction, the mice still needed a motivation, as Busquets explains. “There’s a group of mice living in the millhouse that aren’t necessarily scared but are apprehensive of him. As the days go by, they get more comfortable, and they end up crawling all over him and sleeping with him.”

With a story in place, the attention turned to the animation. “Because the shots weren’t created with that intent, it was a very interesting exercise in choosing plates and thinking, ‘Okay, how could mice be interacting with The Creature here?’ Guillermo gave us an initial brief, but beyond that, he gave the artists at ILM a lot of room to come up with ideas and interpretations and pitch ideas to him, so visual effects had a lot of creative input. There’s one shot where The Creature’s hand is cupped, and the mouse is hanging out. It looks like it was shot for that specific purpose.”

A Shipshape Standard

Beyond ILM’s animal contributions, the company also brought its expertise to the events on Captain Anderson’s (Lars Mikkelsen) sailing ship. These sequences demonstrate how visual effects function in tandem with their practical counterparts. “It all begins with the integration of assets that exist and are tactile, which production did very successfully in this film. The physical sets were grandiose with a high degree of detail, and an amazing amount of work went into them,” Busquets divulges. “A life-size, full-scale version of the ship was built on a gimbal, which I believe rotated nine degrees from side to side. In the shots where you see The Creature pushing the ship, there’s a weight and tactile nature to it that would have been tricky for the actor to mime.

“The counter side is that the set was installed in a parking lot in Toronto, so there were plenty of visual effects to be incorporated around it,” Busquets continues. “ILM handled some extensions for the ship, such as the sails and the masts. For the ground or the ice sheet surrounding the ship, set decoration did an excellent job of putting out snow blankets and dressing it up with tents and props. The immediate area next to the ship was covered with set decoration, but we extended the environment from there. Our goal was to blend into what they had placed, and production did a splendid job of scanning and giving us photo references of everything on set – the barrels, tents, shovels, and the tools that they used to try to free themselves from the ice.”

Busquets indicates assets that ILM focused on, explaining, “There’s a ladder on the side of the ship that, towards the end, when the ship gets pushed, is knocked over. That ladder was CG. There were practical objects that existed, but we ended up replicating and extending a few of them for various reasons. For instance, we replicated tents because we had to extend that environment a little further. The ship was built practically up to a certain height with a bit of rigging, but we extended the masts and added sails and extra rigging.”

Frozen at Sea

Pivoting toward the ice that freezes to the ship’s hull, Busquets notes, “We created the ice that encased the ship, which is an important story point because the expedition was stuck and couldn’t leave were it not for the kindness of The Creature at the end. The heavy lifting is done with the practical set, but breaking ice is not something that you can easily do practically. It would be incredibly difficult to reset after each take, so using visual effects in that case allows them to do what you can’t accomplish otherwise. The way ILM approached the ice fracturing – both the fissures that open beneath The Creature and the ice cracking as he pushes the ship – was to ground things in reality. We studied footage of ice breakers, as well as the dynamics of large formations of ice breaking.”

As critical as factoring in simulation tools for real-world physics was to ILM’s process, they were not the only elements to be considered. “Our ability to art direct the timing and shape of the fractured pieces to match the pre-broken shards, which production designer Tamara Deverell had, was crucial for Guillermo,” Busquets shares. “We needed to tie into that visual language, so it wasn’t so much about finding reference for breaking ice, but making ice break so it ended up looking like what we had on set. It’s a different challenge, in that it was more keyframe animation rather than simulation-driven.”

Busquets reflects on the complexity, noting that “Once we had the building blocks and the timing and shapes that Guillermo preferred, then every single piece of ice had to break into smaller pieces. There was snow on top of the ice and water beneath. I remember someone on my team described it as a game of ‘rock, paper, scissors,’ but with states of matter – we had ice pushing snow, snow melting into water, and then water displacing the ice again. Our work involved studying how each element interacted and pushed everything else, and it all stemmed from art-directed animation.”

Choosing the Right Tool

The marriage between on-set practical special effects and postproduction visual effects is at the heart of many major productions, forming the connection between set, actor, and the final shots visible on-screen. Understanding how important that marriage between departments is, Busquets explains how the two work in concert to bring sequences to life.

“Visual effects is a tool that adds to every other craft, it’s not a replacement. Even if it’s like, ‘Oh, why did we do all of that? We ended up replacing it anyway?’ I think it makes a difference.” On set, the presence of physical props, rain, fire, wind, and other tangible assets all help to place the actors in the scene, and Busquets appreciates the value of that. “When a film crew sees a blue screen, and nobody knows what it’s going to be – they’ll figure it out later in post – there’s a sense of, ‘What we’re doing doesn’t matter.’ By contrast, when special effects and makeup show up on the day, you’d be surprised with the things that, with some ingenuity, end up working.” As students of real life, visual effects artists constantly learn from what they see on set. “Things that might not work on the set teach you lessons about how to fix it in post.”

A primary location that frames the film, the ice-trapped ship required significant departmental overlap.

“A good example is the gimbal. There’s a point in the story where the crew intentionally fires at the ice to break it. It creates a fissure, and The Creature falls into the water.” A scene that sounds simple, but as with most cinematic moments, there was more to it than meets the eye. “The fall into the ice was a platform that was rigged on set above a pool of water. The shot where he drops in the ice and slides in was shot practically on that platform. We then replace the surface to make it look more ice-like.”

Despite all the planning, safety checks, and preparation, things can still go wrong, as Busquets reveals. “That stunt ended up breaking his jaw. The shot where that happened is in the movie and has a great physicality to it, and I’m not advocating that people put themselves in that situation, but the alternative to that is we do it in CG, and the impact wouldn’t feel the same.”

Another sequence that required a practical element is when The Creature hurls a crew member onto a burning log fire. “That was a practical, pull-rig stunt. We added augmentation of the embers and made it a bigger fire, along with extending the environment and adding atmospherics like snow and flurries, but by and large, the stunt was all practical.”

Fight or Flight

Once The Creature has fallen through the ice near the ship, his body descends into the depths amidst air bubbles and his own blood. “That was shot dry-for-wet, following a technique that both Dennis and Guillermo had used on The Shape of Water [2017] to great effect. When the shot came up, we wondered if we should shoot it dry-for-wet or inside of a tank, but production said they’d done the former successfully in the past,” Busquets explains. “The actor was on a suspension rig and dropped away from the camera along with a light projection – the idea being to keep the element of The Creature and have ILM replace what’s around him to make it appear as if he’s in deep water. We added the bubbles and – because he’s just come through the ice-covered surface – we placed lots of floating ice chunks. At that point, he’s heavily wounded, so we added blood trickling and mixing with the water, too.”

We eventually see a flashback to The Creature’s pursuit of Victor Frankenstein, learning that a portion of his wounds originated from allowing a stick of dynamite to go off against his body. This offered ILM another opportunity to pair its visual effects prowess with the expertise of another department. “The majority of the looks of The Creature’s wounds were established by the makeup department. They did incredible work,” Busquets declares. “ILM only stepped in a bit with things like negative space, for example. You can’t do negative space makeup, gouge somebody’s eye out, or hollow the inside of their ribcage [laughs].

“After the dynamite goes off, the camera pushes in, and there’s makeup work already done for the wounds,” Busquets continues. “We just replaced the rib cage so that you could see it hollow. The Creature’s hand gets blown off, so half of his hand was a CG replacement as well, so that we could show bones. Basically, ILM’s contributions were additive on top of the makeup department’s work. The same goes for The Creature’s injured eye. They made a tremendous prosthetic eye, but they obviously couldn’t scrape it into the actor’s head, so it bulged out. However, Guillermo really loved the design of that eye, so our job was to replace it while also making it look exactly like the prosthetic.”

Monster Moments

It’s not the fairest of questions, given the hours, teamwork, and craft required to layer in what constitutes a great shot, but Busquets points to a couple of moments that stood out for him. “After the ship gets pushed to freedom by The Creature, there’s a wide shot of the ship sailing out to sea. I like that shot for a number of reasons. One, all of the environment is CG, but we still used the part of the ship that was practical.” Incredibly, amongst that most Arctic of vistas, part of what we see was literally shot in a car park. “It’s the same ship that was in a parking lot on a gimbal, but the gimbal only allowed it to rotate side to side, meaning you couldn’t physically move it front and back.” To enable the use of the landlocked ship, older methods were employed. “We used a very old technique. We can’t move the ship, but we can move the camera. So we were able to keep the ship from the plate and pretend that it was moving,” explains Busquets. “You’re making the camera travel twice the distance. In post, we halve the distance and put the rest on the ship. That technique worked incredibly well because when we first looked at that plate, we thought we’d have to replace the whole ship.”

It was an elegant solution to the problem, but one that still needed the thumbs-up from the film’s director. “This was a shot that needed to be auditioned, so to speak. Dennis shot this plate and told us, ‘Guillermo is not keen on having drone-like shots because it’s not in the language of the movie, but this environment looks so beautiful that I think we can earn it.’ We did the shot not knowing if it was going to go in the movie or not, but from one of the first iterations, it had a lot of potential. It showed a beautiful environment, and it matched the emotion of the sequence that Guillermo was going for, so he cut it in.” Busquets smiles at the memory. “I’m proud of it for that reason. It’s a shot that originated in visual effects and earned its way into the movie.”

Busquets has another memorable moment from the show, the “spark of life” shot when The Creature first comes to life. “It’s a journey inside of The Creature’s body. The shot starts practical on the set with The Creature, and then we go through the battery, into the heart, and into a blood vessel. We end up in a cavern that has a lymph node that starts to glow.” It’s a beautifully crafted scene, inspired by Mary Shelley, a writer born in 1797 who changed the landscape of modern fiction when, at age 20, she wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818. “The lymphatic system is where the movie says that life starts. Essentially, it’s visualizing that spark of life in the lymph node.”

Beyond ILM’s impressive work, Busquets saw a deeper connection to the sequence. “What I like about it are the parallels between the creative process for the shot and the creative process for Victor creating The Creature. Victor had human pieces that he stitched together, and I can imagine it was a process of trial and error, and it was similar for us. We were prepared to do a full CG journey, and we had laparoscopic footage that we used as reference, but what’s more visceral is to use the footage itself and project it onto our inner organ assets. It took a lot of exploration to decide which parts needed to be CG and which needed to use real footage, and there were plenty of ways to assemble it. It took a while to get there.”

Like the mad doctor, Busquets felt a similar sense of triumph when the scene came together. “I always equated it to how Victor must have felt when creating The Creature, so it was worth it.”

A Visionary Director

In the annals of cinematic history, few directors have such an instantly recognizable style as Guillermo del Toro, a flair and vision he used to full effect in Frankenstein.

“For me personally, it was not a hindrance,” explains Busquets. “It was extremely helpful to have someone with such a strong vision. Even if you didn’t know anything about his previous body of work, one thing that stood out to me was that every time we showed him something, he reacted quickly and decisively.” That decisiveness was a boon to the production. “That was a clear indication to me that he already had a clear vision of what he was going for. It was exploratory in terms of how we’re going to get there, but the vision was there from the beginning.”

In ILM’s quest to deliver realistic and engaging visual effects, was that clear vision a help or a hindrance? “It only makes it more difficult if you try to fight it!” says Busquets, laughing as he continues. “We often try to ground things in reality, and that’s very important, but in this film, it was even more important to ground things in the visual language, themes, and the design that were set forth by Guillermo and production design. Staying true to those themes trumped trying to do something physically accurate and photographic. As long as you’re willing to accept that with Guillermo, then his direction is helpful for visual effects artists, and it’s also very satisfying to work for a director like that.”

Busquets gives an example. “I like that he never told us ‘Go 20% brighter or 50% faster.’ He never gave us notes like that. Instead, he would paint a picture or direct you to another example or bring up obscure references. He has such a database in his head of visual reference; he’d direct you to things that aren’t exactly the thing he wants but are inspirations for it. For artists, that’s gold. It puts you in his head a little bit. Then it’s like ‘Now you give me your interpretation,’ which I thought was brilliant.”

That would lead to some satisfying interactions with the Academy Award-winning director. “Sometimes he also gets surprised – ‘Oh, I like this idea. I hadn’t thought of that, but I love it, and it’s going in the movie!’ I really appreciate that style of directing.”

Serving the Story

Busquets reinforces the notion that ILM’s primary goal is to craft visual effects that support the story filmmakers wish to tell. Referring back to his previous statement that having ILM encase the sailing ship in ice became key to the vessel’s inability to flee from The Creature, “That scene is a perfect example of visual effects in service of the story, which is the best use of visual effects, in my opinion. On a number of occasions, Guillermo insisted to us that he didn’t want to make eye candy – he wanted to make eye protein, as he called it,” Busquets beams. “Yes, we need the visuals, but those visuals need to give people something more meaningful behind them.”

Citing the film’s stylized nature as an indication of the metaphors and connections that del Toro baked into it, Busquets comments, “There are countless visual metaphors in Guillermo’s movies. There are strong visual connections with color, such as the color red being tied to Victor Frankenstein’s mother. If visual effects can tack onto that and further the story, that’s terrific. On the other hand, if you’re just trying to give him something flashy for the sake of being flashy – and that might serve the purpose for other types of stories – it’s not what Guillermo is looking for. Visual effects are important to Frankenstein’s story because Guillermo wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

Busquets believes the visual effects community as a whole must strive to convey a more accurate picture of their on-screen contributions to the public, asserting, “We have a ways to go when it comes to informing audiences and showing what our work actually is. In the past few years, there’s been a trend to consider that anything done with CG is somehow less authentic. There are valid points in that, but I think that criticism often comes from only seeing the CG that’s visible – and not the parts that are invisible. The way I see it, CG and visual effects should be treated as another tool in the toolbox.

“If you try to use the wrong tool for the job, it’s not going to come together. I always equate visual effects to other departments in a movie. A film is not ‘more than’ or ‘less than’ because it uses makeup or stunts – and that goes for every department,” Busquets concludes. “I would love for visual effects to be understood as just another player at the table. Sometimes, visual effects work out in certain situations more so than others, and that’s totally fair. But the theory that ‘CG equals bad’ – we have to aim to correct that.”

Watch Frankenstein on Netflix.

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San Francisco News

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