How on-set performance and CG were mixed together for season 2 of ‘Wednesday’. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine.
Thing, the sentient disembodied hand who accompanies Wednesday at Nevermore, was once again portrayed by the hand of Victor Dorobantu, an entertainer and magician by trade. “The interesting thing about this season with Thing,” recounts production visual effects supervisor Tom Turnbull, “is that we’d done a full season with Victor before and we’d taken the whole thing through post with a number of vendors and when we started, Victor was brand new to this business. But by the time it got to the end of season 1 and into season 2, he’d really taken control of his character and he knew what to do. So, I very consciously backed off so that he would have more space and had other people working with him because he’d just grown so much as a performer, as an actor. That was helpful because in season 1 we did a lot of rehearsals with him. Season 2 we did practically none. He just showed up and figured out what he needed to do and did it.”
Prosthetics designer Tristan Versluis crafted the make-up effects for Thing. “The make-up consists of eight individual prosthetic pieces,” details Versluis. “The wrist stump prosthetic had four versions, three of which are created so Thing can have his stump/arm in different angled positions, and the forth was a new animatronic version so Victor could control the stump moving it side to side and up and down adding an extra dimension of life to the character.”
That animatronic was nicknamed the ‘robo stump’. According to Turnbull, “it was pretty much the same as the upright stump that we had before, but it had a couple of servo motors in it. Victor was able to provide a little bit of extra movement with that to allow the prosthetic wrist to twist this way, that way, go forward a bit, or go backward a bit. He didn’t use it often, but he used it in scenes where he wanted to get extra performance and just that little bit of something that he couldn’t do and not leaving it to post to do just that.”
A typical scene with Thing involved Dorobantu performing on set wearing a blue stocking on his arm, and wearing a blue leotard. Turnbull notes that the bluescreen costume helped with determining what needed to be painted out in post, as well as somewhat disguising Dorobantu. “Victor acknowledged that on set, it makes him disappear to the other actors. He’s just now this shape and the other actors can forget that he’s there and just concentrate on the hand. Victor acknowledged that early on, even in season 1, that was an important thing, and he wore that blue suit even when he didn’t have to. He also started augmenting it this season. He got a whole blue wardrobe! He got a blue puffy jacket to use out in the cold and blue Doc Martens. He really got into it.”
For the vast majority of shots, says Turnbull, Thing performances were realized as practical on-set acting from Dorobantu, where the performer would be painted out of the frame, and some augmentation carried out for the hand stump. “However,” the visual effects supervisor advises, “if there was something a little wrong with the performance, say if his finger slides on the floor in a way that it shouldn’t make total contact, then we’d go in and start manipulating it. Initially we’d go in and do it in 2D, and if we had to, we’d take it into 3D. Then of course there were other scenes where it was obvious it had to be CG, there’s no way anybody could do it.”
“We did have Victor as Thing do some jumps,” adds Turnbull. “There’s one shot where he comes out of an air vent. He jumps from that onto a security camera. We had to do that in two pieces. There’s no way you could physically come out of a vent and actually land on the camera. So we did the first part where he comes to the vent and he jumps off and then we brought him around to the other side, put him on a ladder, and he continued the move and landed on the camera. I never believed it was going to work when we did it, but it lined up really nicely.”
Another new approach this season involved motion capture of Dorobantu. “Previously,” discusses Turnbull, “we had filmed reference of him and provided that to the animators, but this time we actually took him into a mocap studio with Vicon cameras. Typically they’re 40 or 50 feet by volume, but here we were trying to record this little hand in great detail. So we did an experiment with the mocap studio in Dublin where we got them to re-rig their studio and just bring all the cameras down to a tabletop. Then we put the Vicon tracking markers all over his important joints and ran through a lot of his moves that way. The data was really good.”
The Thing prosthetic had previously been scanned in season 1, for turning into a CG model. WeFX took on the digital Thing for season 2. “After consulting with our executive VFX supervisor Mo Ghorbankarimi and executive producer Amanda Lariviere, we started with the asset from the first season from another vendor,” outlines WeFX visual effects supervisor Sam Javanrouh, who also worked with WeFX visual effects producer Janna Miller on the show. “However, the ambitious new vision for the character meant we had to rebuild him from the ground up to deliver the performance required and make him work perfectly in our pipeline.”
“Our creature team, headed by Cesar Dacol Jr., enhanced Thing’s sculpt, adding a new level of detail,” continues Javanrouh. “The iconic stitches were modelled as geometry—a decision for the many close-ups and for their role in the season’s plot. To complete the new look, the team added a distinctive scar and updated the hand’s internal bone structure for more lifelike movement.”
Javanrouh shares that one of WeFX’s major hurdles related to matching the practical Thing prosthetic. “The hand-applied prosthetics weren’t identical day-to-day, so our model had to be adaptable. We solved this by building our asset with flexibility and enough render passes to give our compositors the control to match the practical version in every shot. We built three versions of Thing’s nails, ready to be swapped in to match the make-up of any given scene.”
WeFX’s Thing rigging was led by Ethan Lee. “The rig was designed to handle everything from subtle nuances to the most extreme poses the story threw at him,” explains Javanrouh. “This rig was also shared with the motion capture team to ensure consistency across all performances. The final look involved multiple render passes for ultimate control. To avoid noise or flickering in the final image, especially around the delicate stitches and within the realistic skin’s sub-surface scattering, we used high-sample rendering to capture every intricate detail.”
In terms of animating the CG Thing, Javanrouh remarks on the complexity of dealing with something organic. “The human hand is notoriously difficult to recreate in CG. We see hands every day, so our brains are expertly trained to spot anything that looks unnatural. The slightest flawed movement can shatter the illusion, leaving absolutely no room for error. This high standard meant we had to nail Thing’s performance in every single shot. Adding to that pressure was the fact that Thing’s character is defined by the wonderfully distinct performance of Victor Dorobantu. To achieve this, we embarked on a detailed reference and development process. We started by building a flexible rig, creating a library of motion based on videos of a hand performing countless actions. Next, we asked Victor to perform the same set of poses, allowing us to fine-tune the rig until it could mirror his movements precisely. While motion capture gave us a foundation, our artists invested significant time cleaning and refining the data to achieve a polished result. We also received shot-specific mocap from Tom Turnbull, which was instrumental.”
“For common actions,” adds Javanrouh, “we built a library of walk and run cycles to give our animators a head start. Most of Thing’s screen time involved intricate interactions—like the particularly tricky lampshade sequence—that could only be perfected through painstaking frame-by-frame keyframe animation. It’s a true testament to the skill of our animation team, led by Nadav Ehrlich and Jay Kinsella, who did a phenomenal job on the show.”
Scenes where Dorobantu’s performance with the Thing prosthetic could be retained still required augmentation of the stump. Here, says Javanrouh, the complexity of the shot determined WeFX’s approach to dealing with the stump using a 2D or 3D solution. “On simpler shots, our compositors could paint a solution in 2D. However, the vast majority of scenes involved dynamic camera work and intricate poses that could only be achieved with a fully realized 3D stump. This came with its own set of hurdles. Again, the practical prosthetic wasn’t perfectly consistent day-to-day, so we engineered our rig with a built-in control to adjust its height. The biggest battle, however, was the matchmove. Getting our CG stump to stick flawlessly to a moving, real-world arm was challenging. There was no single solution. It took a combination of manual tracking, precise keyframe animation and subtle warping in the final composite to create the effect.”
The story takes a dramatic turn when it is revealed that Thing is the reanimated, disembodied right hand of Isaac Night (known as Slurp), and that Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones) had severed the hand years prior to save her husband Gomez (Luis Guzmán) from Isaac, with the hand later becoming a loyal, sentient companion to the Addams family. Late in season 2, Isaac forces the reattachment of Thing.
For Turnbull, the reattachment scenes—and later Thing’s breaking free from Isaac—provided a whole new set of visual effects challenges. “There are certain shots where you read it in the script and you don’t really know how you’re going to do it. You’ve got an idea, but you’re not a hundred percent sure that it’s viable and it’s going to work. So, in the scene where the hand is sewn on, we gave WeFX everything we could in terms of data and lighting and reference. But at the end of the day, it comes down to, well, here’s a plate of a guy pretending he’s got a hand on there and an animated needle going in, put this together, and hope for the best. And they really delivered on it.”
“The creative challenge here was to make the procedure look completely real and tactile, but without crossing the line into anything gory,” states Javanrouh. “Our creature team kicked things off by designing the final, fully-attached look. Once that was approved, they essentially worked backward, creating all the components and shapes needed for the connection, including areas for new stitches and realistic interactions with the old ones. Our animators choreographed the needle’s path, and then the effects team, led by Vimal Mallireddy, brought the threads to life with simulations. CG supervisor Parichoy Choudhury, lighting lead Viduttam Katkar and compositing supervisor Alex Basso ensured every piece looked like it was physically there on set. For this sequence, we also consulted our in-house sewing expert: our production manager, Lynn Sibley.”
Thing eventually breaks free from Isaac. This moment was accomplished with the help of a second unit shoot involving Dorobantu. “Here Victor used the bottom stump,” describes Turnbull. “That meant that he could lie on the ground and his stump would be lying on the ground and he could manipulate it from above. It was a huge paint-out but it worked. Then we had a prosthetic arm that was Isaac’s stump, and we essentially had some sticky glue that we put in between the two so that it would feel like they were stuck together and that it would take Victor some effort to pull it apart. You could see the glue stretching, but we painted that out in post and replaced it with a CG patch. For the strings that were in there, some of them were practical, but most of them were added in post as CG strings.”
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