Hello, my name is Stephan Fleet.
I am the visual effects supervisor on The Boys.
Hey, how's it going? I'm Eric Kripke.
I'm the showrunner of The Boys.
It was really important, obviously,
to know the subject matter.
I was a fan of the comic books before I hopped on the show.
So, as a fan, very exciting.
The main thing we wanted to capture from the comics
is the violence and the gore, you know.
I would say that I kept giving the note
that is, I think, different from the books
is that we wanted to be incredibly gritty
and grounded and real.
And that, if there was an insane bit of violence,
it's because that's what would normally happen.
For instance, if you really got laser-eyed by Superman
you would get cut in half.
While we pay attention to the comic book,
we also do our own thing and do a lot of research.
I think we approach any single thing that we do
from a perspective of what are real world things
that we can find to pull from and created it out of that.
Obviously, we couldn't at all tell this story
without the visual effects.
The best visual effects are the ones that do not call
attention to themselves as visual effects.
It's just one coherent universe that you're creating.
If anything, he and I are always trying to figure out
ways of how do we nest it into the scene
a little more, so that you don't even realize that it's CG
or some big showy effect.
It is a storytelling device and a really important one.
We just really work hard to make the production design,
the visual effects, the acting style,
all of one coherent piece.
The way I look at visual effects on this show specifically
but, a philosophy that I think I'm gonna keep
with me forever, is that it is important
but you should only use it when absolutely necessary.
So, you should explore every other option first,
and then, if you can't do it for realsies,
you go into visual effects.
Which could be that you have to do an entire
virtual green screen thing 'cause there's no other way.
Or, it could be that it's 80% our special effects team,
who's awesome, does real explosions
and we pick it up from there.
My sort of Occam's razor of visual effects on The Boys
is to look at the real way first
and then work backwards from there.
Yeah, the big explosions are fun to work on
but the ones that make me laugh and give me joy
are replacing that brick wall with a painting
because we need for that story and no one ever notices.
Yeah, one of my favorite effects last season...
They're driving through the country through the South.
We did an entire CG barn.
The whole barn is CG, everything is CG.
And then, we put Homelander with the Rebel Flag cape
on the side of the barn.
And, it's not a superhero effect,
that's a set extension, basically,
but it's a very story-driven set extension.
It says a lot without saying a word and that's definitely
one of my favorite shots of last season.
Yeah, that's a perfect example.
That was awesome.
It comes down to storytelling really, right?
I mean, at the end of the day,
we're not trying to give people eye candy first, it's there
but we're trying to take this modern technology and blend it
with the classic ideas of storytelling and satire.
It's totally you, it's bold, it's brave, it's feminist.
How is that feminist?
Empowering.
Most importantly, it tells a story.
You have to be really open to
revising the edit as effects start coming in.
I remember, just immediately comes to mind is,
we had a shot where Doppelganger was gonna transform,
he's a shapeshifter, he was gonna transform
into Madelyn Stillwell and we worked on it.
We worked on it, until Stephan and I were finally like,
"Maybe it happens off camera" and then, we just revised it.
It was just so much better. Yeah.
'Cause it left it to the imagination.
Yeah, the visual effect would have, I think,
distracted people from staying with the story in the moment.
So, if it's a distraction, it's gotta go, man.
[Stephan] That's something that we do that's pretty unique,
'cause a lot of times, in my experience
in premium streaming and television,
if a scene has a lot of big, expensive visual effects in it,
you go through great hoops to try and formulate it around
the visual effect sequence,
but that's not the way it should be.
It should be that the visual effects
form themselves around the story.
I think one of the things that's super hard
about Stephan's job is the amount of corpse photos
he has to comb through,
to just see how this stuff really happens
on a real human body.
Yeah, I'm not gonna talk about the future
but just in general, the amount of random things
that we've all got to see thanks to you Eric
have been life changing, possibly criminal.
Yeah. Definitely unique,
and I can say that no one else in the world is gonna have
this experience ever, before or ever again.