The Netflix series Wednesday is a modern take on the class TV show, The Addams Family. It stars Jenna Ortega and Wednesday Addams, who while attending Nevermore Academy, attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, stop a killing spree and solve the mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago. Setting the series’ tone, the first four episodes were directed by filmmaker Tim Burton.

Tom Turnbull

Wednesday was nominated for 12 Emmy Awards, including one for Burton for direction and one for visual effects. VFX supervisor Tom Turnbull and VFX producer Kent Johnson were just two of the team who have been recognized for their work. We spoke to them about the show and its visual effects.

How many shots did each episode have, typically? 
Kent Johnson: They ranged, per episode, from as many as 311 to as little as 97 with an average of 184 shots per episode.

Tom Turnbull: Yes. Roughly 300 shots per episode, which is not super high, but working within a budget and schedule we deliberately focused our resources on shots that count rather than shot count. If a shot did not move the story forward, support the characters or provide emotional impact we did not do it.

What are some of the key VFX in the series?
Turnbull: Thing was the effect that was most important and that most interested me going in. I knew, done right, Thing would be incredibly popular and critical to the character of Wednesday. He needed to be as perfect as we could make him.

Kent Johnson

Nevermore Academy was also a critical, only partially existing as a location, it needed to be created digitally such that is would be accepted as fully real. The creature work, of course, was key and very tricky to pull off on a television budget and schedule.   

Johnson: I agree. The most prominent VFX in the series was likely Thing, the disembodied hand who was usually a 2D effect removing the actor but often a completely 3D CG character. Other effects include set extensions of a castle in the Carpathian mountains of Romania to make it into Nevermore Academy, the CG creatures Hyde Monster, Enid Werewolf, piranhas, Kent the siren/merman and spectacular particle effects in the appearance and destruction of the villain Crackstone.

Did you use virtual production or real-time VFX?
Turnbull: We did not entertain real-time VFX on the show. There was a strong feeling that we needed to ground the look of the show in real-world locations and filmmaking, and that virtual production would not be in keeping with our aesthetic. We did consider virtual production for some driving sequences, but logistically during the height of the pandemic, it was very difficult to orchestrate from Romania. We did use real-time rendering for Nevermore previs with Unreal, allowing us to explore its layout and design and to quickly design shots.

How many different vendors do you use, and what is the turnaround time like? Is it like a traditional television schedule or do you have more time?
Turnbull: There were four main vendors who worked on the complex hero effects and about six or seven secondary vendors who provided support. One of the great things about working with the Netflix model of releasing an entire season on one day is that it allows time to really work the material for early episodes. There is less pressure on hitting a date and some flexibility of dropping in upgraded effects after the mix and color are complete.

Episodes 101 and 102 effectively had eight months to complete, which you would never get on a traditional TV schedule.  This pays dividends in developing looks and procedures that can be applied to later episodes that have a much shorter delivery.   I hope never to see a TV schedule again.  The streaming model provides better creative opportunities.

Johnson: In the end, we relied on 11 different VFX houses. The delivery schedule varied wildly. Some of the more complex sequences took as much as five months from turnover to final delivery while simpler effects were knocked out in days or weeks. Although the turnovers and deliveries were highly fluid, we gave each episode a VFX production schedule of about 100 days in our planning of post.

What about the pipeline? Can you describe it?
Turnbull: On the production side we managed our workflow with Filmmaker databases and spreadsheets. We took the approach that we needed to provide post with as much data and reference as possible, scanning sets, performers and props along with a vast number of digital stills. Managing that much data is a task unto itself. During post we kept a shadow edit on Resolve to manage and assess shot work in context.

Production shot on an ARRI Alexa LF with Signature primes.

Johnson: When we had a locked edit, the editorial department would provide the vendor a QuickTime of the VFX shots in context as a reference. They would then order EXRs of the relevant frames plus 24 frame handles from the post facility using an automated process. The EXRs are posted to the specific vendor’s Aspera accounts for them to download. When the visual effects are approved as final by all of the stakeholders, the final EXRs are then sent from the vendors to the colorist for final grading.

What were the biggest challenges this season? 
Turnbull: To me, the biggest challenge of the season was the sheer volume and variety of the VFX work required. I had worked with Miles and Al before and was familiar with the density and scope of what they put down on the page. It was common to get to page 10 of a script and already be well over what would be considered normal for episodic, both for plot and visual effects. There was no singular effect that I did not have confidence in delivering, it was the number of different effects necessary to tell the story.

There were very few days where VFX was not on-set doing some kind of major effect. It made for a very high-energy, dynamic filming situation, which fortunately, I enjoy. We put a lot of effort into managing the volume of work and in collaboration with Tim and the showrunners, Miles and Al, managed to refine it to its essence. If we had not done that we would have been significantly over budget and the show would have suffered for it.  Less is more as they say.

Johnson: Nevermore Academy was a complex CG asset that required a great deal of time to design, redesign, adapt, model and tweak from shot to shot. The 3D CG Hyde monster was a new creature from the mind of Tim Burton. It required a few different concept artists approaching it from different artistic sensibilities to land on Tim’s vision and then a great deal of time to make such an outlandish creature appear photoreal in both appearance and movement.

What were the tools that you used, and why did you choose them for this project? 
Johnson: As the VFX producer, the tools that I personally used were Adobe Acrobat for scripts, Adobe Photoshop to sketch on and annotate tech scout stills, Microsoft Excel and FileMaker Pro for budgeting, DaVinci Resolve to edit Thing’s rehearsals and Adobe’s Frame.io to view previsualizations of virtual drone shots around Nevermore Academy. I’m very pleased that Tim Burton chose to use a physical miniature of the Addams Family house for a flashback where Wednesday buries her deceased pet scorpion in the family’s pet cemetery. Our vendors used Nuke, Maya, ZBrush, Houdini, Adobe After Effects and other software tools.

What was it about this particular episode that made it Emmy consideration worthy? 
Turnbull: Variety. Episode 108 has a bit of everything in it, Thing, Nevermore, Hyde and Enid Werewolf, along with a host of new effects surrounding Crackstone’s incarnation and demise. It also features complex creature work, including transformations, much more than any of the previous episodes.

We were also under considerable time pressure to wrap principal photography, and it was a minor miracle that we managed to get it in the can. A lot of the visual effects work was, as a result, created entirely in post. No one within the Academy voting membership will ever know or appreciate the team effort that went into that, but I do. The biggest achievements are often the ones that are not noticeable.

Johnson: The episode submitted was the Season 1 finale. With almost 300 shots, it showcased all the best VFX of Wednesday, including Thing, Nevermore Academy, the fight between two fully CG creatures of the Hyde Monster and Enid Werewolf. The battle between Wednesday and her nemesis, the pilgrim Crackstone, brought back from the dead and ultimately destroyed with complex dynamic particle effects and finally the poetic defeat of Christina Ricci’s character by a swarm of animated bees controlled by telekinesis.