LORRAINE CINK: Marvel Studios' Thor, Love and Thunder has epic
visuals and incredible action, which
is why I'm speaking with VFX Supervisor Jake Morrison
to break it all down.
Hey, nice to see you, Jake.
Hi, there.
Lovely to see you.
Great to have a chat about the film.
Yeah, let's do it.
So there are so many incredible visuals in the film,
but I think we should fast-forward
to one of my favorite moments, which is the Gates of Eternity
with some of the most adorable warriors yet
in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and some
of the most incredible visuals.
When you first want to approach that scene,
where did you start?
Sometimes, you start with storyboards.
And then, you move into the previz stuff,
and you go to little cartoon people.
This one, we just jumped straight into the previz.
So we knew what we wanted.
I talked to Taika extensively about the vibe that he wanted.
We kind of already had a structure
that we knew was going to be in there with, like,
2 and 1/2 minutes.
Creative boundaries are actually very
good because it focuses you to come up with something
unusual in there.
Sometimes, a blank slate is actually not helpful
because it could be anything.
But when you know you've got to come up with a fight
beat with the kids in 2 and 1/2 minutes to this song.
It actually pushes you creatively to do
something that's very focused.
So once you have all of those parameters set, what was it
like getting to capture everything on set,
especially with all of those adorable kiddos?
Taika created such a family atmosphere on set.
But this was like a literal family atmosphere.
We had everybody's kids there.
Christians kids in it, Natalie's kids, Chris's kids.
Taika's kids.
Like, everybody's in there.
They're not fighting against monsters of course.
They're fighting against stunt guys in gray suits
with the dots on that you see all the time.
And the kids all did great.
So they learnt their moves.
They weren't swinging off trampolines,
although Chris's kid, one of Chris's kids,
did do what they call a double gainer in wire work, which
is a double backflip in midair.
So there's a chip off the block.
LORRAINE CINK: It's so fun, and just really wildly creative,
and inventive, and not just in the scene
but in the visual effects.
How after, all of these years, do you
keep really raising the bar?
So when you're working with a director like Taika, who
doesn't want you to be in a safe spot, who actually wants you
to go out there and kind of like jump off the cliff and kind
of like ditch the parachute on the way down,
it's exhilarating, and it's terrifying.
But it's also super rewarding as the whole thing comes together.
The challenge in visual effects nowadays is that the audience
are extremely wise.
We all see so many cool things all the time,
but often they're using the same building blocks.
Effectively, you're seeing stuff put together in the same way
that it has been for the last 20 years.
The pictures get better.
The pictures get more complex.
The scope and the scale gets bigger.
But fundamentally trying to change how you do it to come up
with satisfying a vision of an incredibly creatively
hungry director like Taika Waititi,
It is a challenge in itself.
And so he's pushing us to look for the new technologies
that we can bring in to allow us for more
creative opportunities.
Any of the sequences across the picture
couldn't have existed if we hadn't
taken some huge creative leaps and just kind of--
I'm sure it's going to work, and it did.
I'm sure it was going to work.
I was certain.
Yeah, it worked, and thank god.
Oh, I'm sure it was a huge relief.
But in order to make things look so new and so fresh
were there any new technologies or techniques
that you explored?
Instead of having to make a computer-generated version
of each of the kids to receive the lightning,
because they're all covered in lightning, and kind of cheat--
I feel when you do that stuff, it's
never quite like the real kid.
We use this crazy lighting thing,
where you actually light the kids from four different angles
at the same time.
But we have a system where you can take that apart,
and then you can use any given light.
So when one of the kids goes and smashes a monster here--
and it splats, and you get lightning in the face--
the light that's on the kid's face
is really what it would have looked like if that happened.
But we were able to choose later on.
And Taika wanted us to try and find new technologies
and push that stuff forward, and we're proud of that.
So once you then have all of those different kinds
of pieces of footage, how do you start to put it all together?
It's actually a very creative process when you get to post
with this because you effectively--
when you're shooting, you have all
these different lighting passes, but they're all conjoined.
So we do what we call dealing.
You take them, and you, like, [MIMICKING CARDS BEING DEALT]
like a deck of cards. You deal them out.
And now, you've got four, six different layers of light,
the light from here the light from here
and the light from there.
Then, it's a matter of going through in editorial.
We start doing our what we call postviz, when you start adding
the monsters in but you're using live action, as opposed
to previz.
And you start building the scene.
And you start saying, well, you know
what would be cool is if this one blows up like that,
if that one blows up like this, if we have
a lightning strike from here.
If Axl does a huge move here and smashes down,
we should have a light from the foreground.
And then, you can start like blending like a chef, where you
basically go through and you start pulling the ingredients
you need from lighting.
You've already got this stuff because you've already
shot it, crazily enough, but you get to choose
how much you blend it in post.
I mean, again, technically, it's never been done before,
completely crazy, but from an artistic point of view,
super satisfying.
And then, because it's real, you're
actually working with these kids, not
computer-generated versions of them.
Seeing the whole thing come together is pretty gratifying.
It's cool.
It well certainly is.
So Jake, now looking back at this entire experience,
you've gotten to work on all four
of Marvel Studios' Thor films.
What do you love the most about these stories
and these characters?
The interesting thing about Thor, as a character
and from a visual effects point of view, is it can be anything.
It's not a grounded character.
Like, there's no character in the Marvel Universe
that epitomizes space opera like Thor.
He can be anywhere.
He can do anything.
He's got magic.
He's got science.
From a visual point of view, you get to tell any story you like,
and that's the attraction.
Well, you make it look fun, and you
make it look incredible.
Thank you so much for talking with us, Jake.
And of course, everyone, go experience
Marvel Studios' Thor, Love and Thunder in theaters now.