With the 10-episode “Murderbot” series, we actually get two sci-fi shows in one: There’s the main sci-fi comedy from Chris and Paul Weitz about a rogue security robot (Alexander Skarsgård) hiding his free will while on a dangerous mission with a group of scientists. In addition, there’s Murderbot‘s favorite space soap opera that he watches for escapist fun: the cheesy “Star Trek” parody, “Sanctuary Moon” (starring John Cho as the Captain).
For production VFX supervisor Sean Faden, this meant wrangling a diverse array of nearly 1,800 VFX shots (spread among DNEG, Pixomondo, Image Engine, and Fin Design, among others). This included the opening and closing of Murderbot’s helmet (his practical white suit was created by costume designer Laura Jean Shannon), the UI that reflects his POV (accompanied by his snarky voice-over commentary), a giant alien worm, and the realistic VFX used on the bridge of the spaceship on “Sanctuary Moon.”
“For the opening and closing of the helmet, the pitch that we had for the VFX team [at DNEG] with Chris and Paul was something mechanical based on the design of the suit itself,” Faden told IndieWire. “And then let the nanotech just kind of help us justify the pieces getting small enough that they could all fit together.
“So that’s why, when you watch it,” he continued, “the pieces still kind of have a motion to them that is more or less related to the shape of the helmet design itself. But the thing that was really fun was that Murderbot doesn’t really wanna open its helmet most of the time, and I thought it would be great to have a button to play with. In Episode 1, it just opens quickly because it needs to. But, in Episode 2, Murderbot presses it and there’s a pregnant pause to show that he’s just messing with Gurathin [David Dastmalchian], who he doesn’t like.”
For the floating graphics displaying Murderbot’s system alert, Faden worked with Finn and their design team, Super Vixen. He even had an idea of making the graphics character-driven during a Murderbot fight scene with another robot. That’s where he cycles through all of his opponent’s programmed moves so he can successfully counter-punch.
“We wanted to bring all these graphics for fight enhancement that are still telling the story,” he said. “We did 20 or 30 versions of this shot until we had something that we all felt was working. Sometimes it would feel too fast or too long. It was like, what was the right amount of time for the audience to be able to read what was happening? And it was cycle, cycle, cycle, and then pose match, and then do an outline, blink, on the other unit until he’s found the right match. And then you can rewind it and show that he’s actually going to do the same move. I think we found the right sweet spot.”
The alien worm from DNEG was obviously very different from their iconic sandworm from the “Dune” franchise. This was more like a caterpillar body with odd patterns on its plates and a snapping turtle mouth. The sharp, bending legs were inspired by the warrior bugs from “Starship Troopers,” which Faden previously worked on.
“When the worm swallows Murderbot, we literally had a kiddie tunnel attached to a crane with a camera and dropped that on,” said Faden. “Our stunt guy would actually get a real reaction of being inside the kiddie tunnel with a bunch of grips rocking it around and getting him knocked back and forth.”
Meanwhile, the use of an LED wall from Pixomondo to create the background environments on “Sanctuary Moon” was intended to look impressive in combo with a real set, despite the show’s cheesy vibe. “We had the footage on the screen, and it was all tracked to the camera,” Faden added. “And we had three cameras running at once, so sometimes the lock off camera on the side might just be seeing a wall and didn’t have to track, and that was okay. Whereas the hero camera would track with the standard volume workflow. That worked really well.”
But “Murderbot” also made use of a lot of good drone location footage from Toronto, Moab, Utah, and Iceland. “I went to Utah and shot a ton of stuff for over two days,” Faden said. “And a lot of those wider establishing shots were used for the Hopper spaceship. I think a huge part of the success of our show visually was that we were able to get that drone footage from a lot of different locations. And then we treated them. Fin added clouds, skies, and color corrected them. And then that material was put onto our LED walls, so that was really helpful.”
“Murderbot” is now streaming on Apple TV+.
