‘Loki’ Season 2: Sometimes the Best CG is No CG

Just to prevent any misunderstanding: Not only are there visual effects on display in Season 2 of Marvel Studios' Loki, but, to appropriate one of the many imperishable lines from a certain 1990s sitcom, they’re spectacular. When you’re dealing with phenomena like galactic looms, spaghettification, and time-slipping, inevitably you’re going to be pushing some pixels around in highly sophisticated and creative ways. Yet, as Production VFX Supervisor Chris Townsend discovered, sometimes limiting the use of CG and grounding visuals more firmly in reality can deliver exceptional results.

In fact, Season 2 of Loki recently received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Special Visual Effects In A Season Or A Movie. In the new season, which premiered October 5, 2023 on Disney+, the MCU’s favorite trickster (Tom Hiddleston) works alongside Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson) and other representatives of the Time Variance Authority to fix his Tesseract-related, time-altering mistakes. Navigating an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous multiverse, Loki and his cohorts must search for Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino), Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and Miss Minutes (Tara Strong), as well as sort out what it means to possess free will and purpose.

While Townsend’s remit wasn’t quite as existentially fraught, he and his team had their share of challenges, both pasta-related and other.

But first, enjoy this featurette that captures a bit of Loki's rather unpleasant time-slipping VFX:

Dan Sarto: Loki is one of my favorite Marvel characters, and I've really enjoyed the series. In the latest season, there are a lot of very interesting visuals that are part of the world – the time loom, multiple environments, some historical settings. How did you approach and plan for Season 2?

Chris Townsend: The whole variety of work was really thrilling and challenging. Every time I read a script, I’m like, I have no idea how we're going to do that. That's what makes it so much fun. One of the biggest and the hardest things [on Loki Season 2] was creating the loom environment, for which TRIXTER was doing the work. As we started to visualize what it was, and how far away it was, and how big it was, and how much of a void it was, we soon realized that it would be very difficult to use it to tell the story if it just looked like a big matte painting out there. There was no sense of scale, there was no sense of the vastness to the whole world, the environment itself. And there was no real sense of peril.

It always comes back to storytelling, to using the visuals to enhance the narrative. With that particular environment, we ended up creating volumetrics within the world to help sell the volume and also to increase the peril. We added what we call prismatic flares, where we had these rainbow lights going across now and again, which was something the directors and the DP really wanted to do. We were able to evolve the project and evolve the process to create a logical reason for why things were happening. That was probably one of the hardest things to try and figure out.

DS: Were there other specific effects that presented significant challenges?

CT: Spaghettifying characters and worlds. On the page, it just says, “and then they spaghettify,” and it's like, what does that mean? We started visualizing everything that was related to time as some form of strand – so the loom is weaving strands of time, and when we see the world being destroyed, it’s because a timeline has been cut. And so we thought, well, we can literally spaghettify people. There's this thought that if you were to stand on the edge of a black hole, you would be drawn into strands and spaghettified.

Two of the directors, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who were also executive producers on the show, had a very strong aesthetic idea of what they wanted. And one of the big things was making things as tangible and as physical as possible. The strands, the spaghettification process, was motivated by the original set photography, which we then created CG versions of, and Framestore created the effect. We took scans and photographs of each individual set and environment and character, and then we would extrude that through an almost Play-Doh extrusion effect to create this spaghettification.

Then there was the time-slipping. What is time-slipping? We looked at all sorts of references. We looked at long-multiple-exposure photography, we looked at Cubist paintings, we looked at portraits by Francis Bacon, and we finally settled on this amalgamation of all these different things. But, again, it was a time-related thing, which introduced a spaghetti or stringy or taffy-like feel to this character. You see him in different places, but at the same time, and in different poses. And so we got multiple performances of Tom Hiddleston doing those various actions, which we then took to Framestore and simplistically comped them together, created CG versions, and used simulation software to create this extruded pattern, so that every pose would have this sort of stringy, taffy feel.

And the final piece that was incredibly challenging was in Episode 6, Loki walking up the stairs to sit in the throne, a very difficult sequence to visualize and to create, trying to lean into everything that we've done previously in terms of the timelines. But now he's a god and he's not just Loki. He's able to hold on to the strands of time and bring them together. That was a very long process, working again with Framestore to create something that was unique.

DS: You’ve been a production VFX supervisor on some of the biggest visual effects-driven films. Was your approach different on an episodic project than it has been on features?

CT: It's interesting, because this was my first time putting my toe into the water of streaming, as it were. And I was surprised at the similarities. I thought it was going to be very, very different. But, really, as someone else has said, it's like a six-hour movie. One of the things that we tried to do here, because there's been this backlash against CG being overused, was to emphasize that it should be story-driven, and it should be up to the director exactly where and when you use visual effects. Let's use visual effects where we need to use it, where it makes sense to use it, but let's not just use VFX as an easy out. And, because this show had a lower budget, and because we had six episodes to go through, it was a much more curated approach to visual effects, trying to use them just where necessary.

Somebody asked me, what's the biggest difference between this and previous Marvel movies? And my answer was, ceilings. I wasn’t used to that. I'm used to walking on and there's a big light rig, because it makes it easier to shoot that way. It's easier to shoot if you don't have a ceiling, you have a flyaway ceiling. And it was brilliant to be working in a world where you were contained and what was photographed was real. We did do set extensions, but we did it only where necessary. We tried to keep things in camera as much as possible, and because of that, we have a much more grounded look to the show.

DS: Are there things you’ve learned on Loki that you can take forward to future projects?

CT: The first season, which I wasn't involved with, had about 2,500 shots, and I think it looked generally really great. Surprisingly, the second season had only about 1,200 shots. We were all thinking it was going to be a 2,500-3,000-shot show, because that's what these are. In the past, I would tell people, “you can build the prop, but they're probably going to replace it in CG” or “don't bother adding smoke because CG will do it." There's been that approach to things. And what we did on this show was we went to every department and said, "What you create will be onscreen, so give us your A game." And that's what everyone did, across all departments. It was phenomenal.

DS: When you look at visual effects work – I'm not talking about the projects you're on – what’s most important to you? What do you look for and how do you evaluate the work?

CT: As an audience member, you don't watch a seven-second clip over and over again, as we do when we're examining the shot and trying to solve problems. As an audience member, you watch it through. So if a shot doesn't stand out for me, that’s what counts. Often I will watch a scene and, afterwards, I'll think, that can't have been real and it didn't take me out. That's the big thing, right? Does it take you out of the moment? That's what I'm always in awe of.

One of the things on Loki was that final sequence of him climbing up the stairs. Up until that point, almost everything that we had done had been shot in a set or on a location. There were some bluescreen elements, like looking through the windows, looking out into the loom, and there obviously were some shots that were full CG. But in that final moment, it goes crazy. The loom is exploding. Loki is grabbing strands, he's climbing an invisible staircase, he's transforming into a god. We pull out and reveal that we're in a galactic world. How do you make that look real? You can't.

At that point, you've got to ask, have we earned this moment? Have we earned this moment in the series, where an audience will go along with us and say, yep, okay? It's big and bombastic and it's crazy, but we are all in at this point. There are moments where you have to just do it, and you do it as beautifully and as elegantly and as sumptuously as possible, and hope that the audience comes along with you for the ride

Jon Hofferman is a freelance writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He is also the creator of the Classical Composers Poster, an educational and decorative music timeline chart that makes a wonderful gift.