Publish date: 2024-08-23

When veteran Marvel visual effects supervisor Christopher Townsend — who has Oscar nominations for “Iron Man 3,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” and “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” — made his foray into TV work with Season 2 of “Loki,” the project wasn’t as different from his feature work as he anticipated. 

The season had a whopping 1,210 VFX shots (for comparison, “Shang Chi” had 1,761) and they were similarly distributed among a group of familiar VFX companies including Framestore, Industrial Light & Magic, Trixter, Rising Sun Pictures, FuseFX, Cantina and Lola. 

And as one would expect, they also had to maintain the highest standard for the effects. 

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“We’re seeing such high-quality work being produced for television,” Townsend says. In the case of “Loki,” in which Tom Hiddleston reprises his role as the eponymous Asgardian god of mischief, Townsend relates that one of the trickier elements to get right was the effect used to show Loki “time slipping” between points in time, an effect that took some inspiration from long exposure photography and Francis Bacon paintings. The result is a clever combination of live action, CG and 2D compositing techniques. 

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The process started with photographing Hiddleston doing multiple, different performances (sometimes in front of a blue or green screen). “We would shoot the scene with him coming in and out of the moment, and then we would shoot multiple passes of him coming in and out of that specific moment,” he says. 

Next, Townsend effectively took over directing duties, asking Hiddleston to give additional, different performances for the effect. “He was absolutely fantastic in the way he literally flung himself into the performances and gave us twists and turns and something aggressive and something slow, something lunging at camera, something sort of mellow and melancholic,” Townsend says. 

These performances were edited together to try to create a visceral feeling for this time-slipping experience. These takes were then handed off from editorial to VFX house Framestore, which took it from there. 

This involved creating a fully CG Hiddleston, complete with his clothes and hair, allowing the VFX team to simulate the movements between the individual frames, and create a “stringy, goopy feeling,” says Townsend. “Once they created that [in CG], we rendered it, lit it and then comped it back together.” 

The stringy-ness in the effect wasn’t conceived without purpose. “One of the other big things that we had going on over the entire series was this idea that time is strings and strands,” he notes. “We tried to continue tying that string theory into everything.” 

The final touches of the time-slipping shots involved “going back and hand painting on frames to create sort of a layer of finesse and detail and also gruesomeness in places where you might see a popping eyeball or a stretched mouth or teeth or a grimace, and just on individual frames you’d get this sense of the pain and anguish that he was going through.” 

Simultaneously, the aim was also to keep it “tangible” by not taking the effects too far. Says Townsend, “That’s often the challenge with what we’re tasked with doing — creating something which is almost believable and so not too out there, so that an audience isn’t taken out of the moment. It’s ultimately all about the storytelling and always maintaining that narrative.” 

The results seem to have achieved this goal. The VFX pro says, “It gave us something which I think feels ultimately very physical and very visceral, and something that, hopefully, an audience can grimace alongside the pain and anguish that Loki is going through during those moments.”

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