4 of the highest contenders for the 2026 visible results Oscar boldly reimagine beloved worlds or characters. For “Superman” and “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” the VFX groups created vibrant, idiosyncratic visions of two of probably the most well-known comic-book franchises. The remake “How to Train Your Dragon” translated beloved pc animation to dwell motion and the sequel “Tron: Ares” downloaded components from a digital area to the flesh-and-blood world.
Making ‘Superman’ enjoyable once more
For writer-director James Gunn’s hotter, extra optimistic tackle “Superman,” a core mantra was “How do we keep it fun?”
“When Guy Gardner [Nathan Fillion as the notoriously caustic Green Lantern] uses his powers, there is a playfulness,” says visible results supervisor Stephane Ceretti. “Guy creates oven mitts to capture this kaiju. When he sweeps away the tanks, we didn’t originally have him using [a giant] middle finger, but it works.”
For the flying scenes, they employed the “volume” — the current expertise that surrounds bodily components of units with large LED screens displaying the environments of the scene (say, one other planet or the town of Metropolis, blazing by at breakneck speeds seen by a personality in flight). That alternative allowed star David Corenswet to react in actual time to his filmed setting, quite than taking pictures him earlier than a blue display and later superimposing him over footage.
For the surprising message from Superman’s Kryptonian dad and mom that upends his complete id, “We used a very cutting-edge technique called ‘4D Gaussian splatting’ that allows us to record a real hologram,” says Ceretti. “We had 192 cameras that recorded them from all different angles — close, far — at the same time. It had never been used before in a film.”
However the visible impact that greatest expresses the film’s “punk” persona may be Krypto, the superdog — or superbad canine.
“James said he cracked the code — ‘My dog is a bad dog and Krypto’s going to be a bad dog,’” says Ceretti, laughing.
Tips on how to practice your dragon for a live-action remake
To transform the CG-animated “How to Train Your Dragon” to dwell motion, all filmmakers needed to do was threat life and limb in helicopters and discover, you already know, dragons.
VFX supervisor Christian Manz says they used a mixture of actual animals as reference factors: “Toothless might look like a black salamander/dragon, but he behaves like a cat or a panther. A lot of it was about how to ground them, become scene partners with real actors. Hopefully people don’t even think about” the dragons being CG.
As soon as they appeared actual, they needed to fly as compellingly as within the 2010 authentic.
“A lot of it was driven by the cinematography, working with Bill Pope,” he says. “We looked at a bunch of stuff Tom Cruise has done because, often, it’s being done for real. ‘What would you be doing if you were trying to film this?’
“Actually flying around in a helicopter with [director Dean DeBlois] and Bill when we were reckying [reconnoitering] everything — we wanted to transfer how we felt, zooming through canyons and things. That’s why ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ works, because they’re in those planes. In those flying sequences, you had to feel it.”
From the brand new ‘grid’ to the actual world and again to the outdated grid
“Tron: Ares” VFX supervisor David Seager had two major challenges within the franchise’s third movie — bringing components from the up to date digital area to the flesh-and-blood world, and revisiting the constraints of the 1982 authentic.
“I’ve been calling it ‘visual effects haiku,’” says Seager. “Trying to get to the core of what makes it look like the 1982 “grid”; in lots of instances it was turning issues off.
“Back in the day, you had to really work hard to do all these fancy techniques. Now it was like, ‘Nope, turn that off, turn that off’ and introducing what we now consider errors.”
However the way to transplant characters and autos from the physics-defying grid to the actual world? “Let’s shoot it as real as possible. We’re going to go on location and shoot a light cycle chase.”
They modified electrical Harley-Davidsons to shoot a “more traditional, spy film, motorcycle chase scene,” then changed them in submit with the futuristic gentle cycles. “It looks real because they shot it for real — all those little camera operations, adjusting to a stunt performer braking to go around a car — then we made it a visual-effects problem.”
Big steps towards a gleaming retro-future
For the glowing, retro-future “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” VFX supervisor Scott Stokdyk’s workforce painstakingly crafted an alternate New York Metropolis mixing Sixties structure with out-of-this-world, “Jetsons”-like futurism. However followers of Marvel’s First Household will most respect how “First Steps” expresses the workforce’s superpowers.
As an example, for Sue Storm / the Invisible Girl’s power fields and invisibility, Stokdyk discovered that director Matt Shakman responded to “Things that looked optical, like multiple exposures of photography, prismatic light,” ensuing within the first big-screen depiction of Sue’s powers to convey their foundation in gentle.
For probably the most spectacular sequence, with the heroes perilously close to a neutron star, the filmmakers checked in with astrophysicist Cliff Johnson weekly. Among the many nuggets he shared: “There’s a lensing effect that expands things out and warps things out in a very interesting way,” which impacts our view of the celebs round it. “He worked with us on the color palette too.”
However the largest problem in that sequence, says Stokdyk, was Sue’s zero-G hair. Bemoaning earlier methods and the paucity of usable real-world references, he laughs and says, “We had our breakthrough when Katy Perry went up!”
