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An excerpt from issue #38 of befores & afters magazine.

Towards the end of **Thunderbolts*, the heroes find themselves inside the memory of Bob’s (Lewis Pullman) initial experimentation in a Malaysian lab. Here Bob ultimately confronts his alter ego. The Void initially restricts the Thunderbolts from helping Bob, until Yelena (Florence Pugh) is able to break free, parkouring her way through a crumbling lab, before she and the rest of the team eventually help Bob to subdue the Void**.

The parkour aspect of the sequence, in which Yelena jumps, twists, and turns through various obstacles as the lab is crumbling around her, came late in production. It was designed to showcase the close relationship between Yelena and Bob. In additional photography, Pugh performed many of the ins and outs of the parkour moves, with stunt coordinator Heidi Moneymaker carrying out the stunt moves.

“We would have static pieces of lab equipment or falling building pieces for Heidi to touch or spin off,” advises visual effects supervisor Jake Morrison. “That gave us a connection point just to make sure that it didn’t feel weightless. Anytime where she reaches down and does a fulcrum push, that thing was there. It’s just that we eventually made those pieces CG and animated them through the connection points for each moment.”

Framestore took on the sequence, including adding to the chaos of the lab breaking apart. “When they made the sequence a little bigger,” outlines Framestore visual effects supervisor Mat Krentz, “our brief turned into recreating the lab as a fully CG environment. Not only that, the lab had to grow, it had to expand, and things had to be moving around, with glass breaking and shattering and ceiling cracking and floor opening. We had to cut all the actors out and put them inside, and then also do some digi-double replacements for some shots. Meanwhile, all the props inside the lab were glass, so it was glass on glass!”

The cracking roof proved to be one of Framestore’s trickiest moments, says Krentz. “We started animating it directionally so that it felt like it was coming from Bob and Void, as in, growing outwards. Jake Schreier ultimately wanted it to feel more ambient in the end and more connected to Bob’s punches on Void. So, we had FX animating the cracks based off of the timing of when Bob was punching. It gave us this really cool effect as if the whole room was reacting to Void getting beaten up.”

The Bob and the Void fight ends with Bob eventually getting the upper hand and sitting on top of Void and punching him. Here, Framestore gave Pullman as the Void the shadow treatment, matching to what ILM had achieved earlier. The studio tested the shadow look first with a 3D version of the Void and then settled on a comp treatment of footage of the actor. Says Krentz: “It had to be very, very, very specific about getting rid of all of the details in the shadows of him. You would see a tiny bit of detail in his key light from the practical lighting, and then we would basically compress everything off of that range. A lot of times we’d sculpt in some mouth movement, because that was some detail we really wanted to retain. We would roto in shapes and we would do different projections for trying to retain detail in his eyes.”

The Thunderbolts are initially held back against the lab wall by objects that the Void has pinned or twisted around them. On set, stand-in objects were used and then replaced with CG versions by Framestore. “We came up with a lot of the looks for these objects, like the top of a chair pinning down Yelena and Red Guardian. We animated those to pin them, and then there were some effects like dust and debris added to the connecting points to make it feel like they were fighting against them but it was holding them back.”

For the Yelena parkour moments, Framestore’s animation team timed out the whole sequence from a third perspective camera to match to the characters run and jumps. “Then we animated the props coming through and matched to her jumping off them,” details Krentz. So much of it was Florence, and then it was also stunt work, so we worked with Rising Sun Pictures which did most of the face replacements. There were also one or two shots with a full digi-double takeover.”

During the fight, the Void starts taking over Bob’s body through shadow. “Again,” discusses Krentz, “we looked at ILM’s treatment of the New York shadow growth and took that as inspiration. We had all the match moves of Lewis doing all the punching. It was a comp treatment, but with 3D match move treatment. We would run noise patterns that mimicked that shadow growth look as he was doing the punching, and we progressed it throughout the sequence to make it feel like it was growing around his neck. It stops just as Yelena comes and grabs him and then starts receding.

Ultimately, the visual effects in **Thunderbolts* serve as the film’s invisible backbone—seamlessly blending spectacle with story to bring its darker, character-driven world to life. “Overall, the picture was a very different experience for me,” comments Morrison. “The look, the feel and the vibe was the opposite of my last few movies which have been expansive cosmic spectacles. Being challenged to integrate the VFX** to the level that the audience genuinely just believe all this happened and subconsciously don’t question that is a very different aesthetic to the ‘buckle-up and look at this’ world building that I’m used to.”

Morrison praises director Jake Schreier and the entire filmmaking team in how they collaborated with VFX on the film. “The Heads of Department that Jake collected were truly wonderful to work with and Jake’s extreme preparation, storyboarding and consistent vision made sure that each and every department worked together seamlessly to find creative solutions to his requests. As a production VFX supervisor it’s often hard to explain to people that during the prep stage VFX is often there as a discussion rather than an outright necessity and sometimes just being in a position to point out to the key crew that the old-school techniques are just as good as the new-school ones forces everyone to up their game. We should only rely on VFX to do the things that cannot be done for practical reasons.”

“That said,” adds Morrison, “this film challenged our vendors in so many different ways but the thousands of artists on the show rose to the challenge and I couldn’t be more proud of the final product and thankful to our wonderful worldwide VFX family.”

Persons: Lewis Pullman, Florence Pugh, Heidi Moneymaker, Jake Morrison, Mat Krentz, Jake Schreier

Company Names: Framestore, ILM, Rising Sun Pictures

Titles: Thunderbolts*, Interstellar, Wednesday, Together

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