How did you get started in VFX?
I was 18, going to college at SVA in NYC. I needed a job, and so in 2000 a local studio, Curious Pictures, took me in as an intern. I already knew how to use Adobe After Effects, a platform they were using, so I tried to make myself as useful as possible.
How did you get involved with The Penguin?
In 2023, The Penguin was starting to go into prep, and after seeing The Batman in cinemas, I knew I wanted to work on Gotham City’s continuing story. HBO, who I had just completed THE NEVERS with, was very accommodating, and set up a call for me to meet with showrunner Lauren LeFranc. She had such a clear vision of the story she wanted to tell!
How did working on the show differ from other projects you’ve worked on?
Many shows are decidedly VFX “spectacles”, where the VFX help drive excitement, action, and a wondrous quality of escape and fantasy. The Penguin, from the very start, despite its comic book origins, was to be rooted in grounded, realistic storytelling. All our VFX, even the large in scope ones, existed only to heighten that grounded tone. By focusing on visceral emotional affectation, the visual effects were there to be felt, not to be seen, even when something larger than life, like an explosion giving way to a tsunami like flood, is being witnessed.
How did VFX help enhance the show’s story?
Continuing from the example above, we had to make the flood event subjective, not objective. We had to be from the point of view of Victor, if we hoped for the viewer to feel what he feels. So all the shots are designed to be from his vantage point. No cut aways to close ups of the action or fancy flyover crane moves. We never see the explosions front and centre. They go off all around Victor, heightening the fear you get when you’re not in full control of a situation. And when the waters come, we focus on the trajectory of the water which is headed to his family at home. Every VFX shot of the scene is designed to be there to heighten and amplify the gut punch that Victor experiences as he helplessly watches his family die.
How many shots did you work on for the show?
The total count I believe is 3,107 VFX shots. These were spread across many vendors including European-based SSVFX in Dublin, Accenture Song in Stuttgart, Dneg/Redefine in Barcelona, and FrostFX in Tallinn. Additionally, in Canada we had Stormborn Studios in Vancouver and Pixomondo in Toronto.
How long did the process take?
For The Penguin, principal photography started in March 2023, with final post production concluding days before airing in September 2024.
How big was the team that was involved? Please describe the technology and techniques used on the project and what they did.
We had six key vendors as listed above, and on the production side I had a VFX team of about 12 members. I’m a big believer that the role of the VFX department is not just to do computer graphics, but to problem solve for the unknown “X” variables that occur during production. For example, with changing safety rules, the prop guns can no longer fire charges that give you that signature “muzzle flash” blast of light. That light is an important part to add to the realism of a VFX gun shot, but is costly and frankly hard to make realistic in post. So we implemented the use of “flash-guns” which would emit a super bright flash of LED light when the actor pulled the trigger, but also was wirelessly synced with the rolling shutter of the camera, down to the millisecond. This gave the director and actors something more visceral to playoff of while filming, and also immensely helped reduce the amount of VFX work.
Were there are tools that were particularly helpful for working on The Penguin?
SideFX’s Houdini and Autodesk’s Maya and Flow are known for their ubiquitous influence in high end VFX, it is notable that we also used Adobe After Effects to deliver more than 300 final VFX shots, and countless concept and temp VFX shots. We also used Adobe Premiere as an internal editing workflow, creating the final outputs used in some LED walls seen in the show.
Sync Sketch became a backbone of our review process. We spotted entire episodes in Sync Sketch, interactively drawing notes and annotations on moving footage, with Matt Reeves, Lauren LeFranc and myself often on opposite coasts, and with vendors on other continents.
Water is notoriously difficult to recreate, so how did you deal with that challenge for the flooding scenes?
For the flood, one key workflow decision was made early on. We wanted our picture editor, Andy Keir, to work in a way most natural to the editing process. So the VFX team provided to editorial a low resolution version of the flood scene as one long continuous master shot, dubbing it “digital dailies”. While low res and crudely textured, the water and destruction physics were accurate to real world physics. And by obeying real world physics we have our best chance of making the water move realistically. So with these digital dailies, Andy Keir could chop up and edit in whatever portions of the flood moments he saw fit, preserving the natural behaviour of the water, instead of forcing the water to perform in the confines of individually cut shots.
Did you use virtual production at all – if so, how?
We did numerous “driving” scenes using LED walls, at a facility called “Carstage” in NYC. One unique thing we did was partner up with WB Games, who created the Batman game “Gotham Knights”. We worked together to record the views you would see out the window of a virtual car driving through the already built game world of Gotham City. And without any additional VFX, that’s what you see in the show especially in episode 8. It worked like a charm!
What was the biggest challenge of working on The Penguin?
Because the writing, actor performances, and overall story were at an incredibly high bar, we had a responsibility in VFX to match that bar. For every shot we asked ourselves if the VFX were in any way hindering, detracting or distracting from the story and characters, course corrected if it was, until the VFX were only clarifying, enhancing, or elevating the story and characters. That’s when the VFX shot was complete.
What were your biggest achievements?
I think for myself, and the entire VFX crew, we grew tremendously as artists and filmmakers. We were constantly honing in on what makes not just visuals, but the story to be compelling and effective, being taught by the best. It was like going to HBO university, taking a film class by Lauren LeFranc and Matt Reeves. So I think our biggest achievement was passing the class!
