Summary
Lokiseason 2 marked a potential endpoint for Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief, and its three Emmy Award nominations make it clear that the hard work that brought the show to life has been recognized. The Disney+ series has always been an awards contender, with the first season also garnering a number of nominations. For season 2,Lokiwas nominated in the fields of “Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes”, “Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Comedy Or Drama Series (One Hour), and “Outstanding Special Visual Effects In A Season Or A Movie”.
Loki’s visual effects nomination comes in part thanks to the work of VFX supervisor Chris Townsend. Townsend had to build off the visual interpretation of theMarvel Cinematic Universe multiverseestablished in other projects forLokiseason 2, shepherd the creation of time jumping and spaghettification, and much more. Despite only joiningLokifor season 2, Townsend is a veteran of the MCU—his past credits includeShang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,Iron Man 3, andCaptain Marvel.
Loki Season 2 Ending Explained
Loki season 2’s finale is massive for the MCU as well as for the God of Mischief who’s found his ultimate glorious purpose while saving the TVA.
In conversation withScreenRant about his Emmy-nominated work on the show, Townsend detailed his experience coming into the second season of an already established show and working to elevate an already successful aesthetic. He also exposed some of the process by which MCU properties utilize assets from other projects, specifically in regard toLokiandDeadpool & Wolverine.Townsend also reflected on the riskyLokiseason 2 ending, the emotional impact of which was heavily reliant on the success of the VFX.
Chris Townsend Discusses Elevating The Aesthetic Of Loki Season 2
Screen Rant:I love the visuals and the aesthetic that were created forLokiseason 1, and I feel like season 2 managed to improve on those. What did you want to lean into coming into season 2 as someone who wasn’t involved in the first season?
Chris Townsend: I think season one did a really good job, and they created an aesthetic and a design language. We were very fortunate that we had Kasra Farahani, who was the production designer on the first season, come into the second season as well. He also directed episode 3, but his main role on the show was as production designer. It was great to have that continuity and have someone who knew the world of the TVA so well.
We didn’t want to change things for the sake of changing them, but we did want to improve where we could and finesse things. Everything is slightly different, from the way that we have deletion effects and Miss Minutes to the look of the TVA expanse, when we look out to the never-ending city. We looked at how it was done in the first season and figured out what we could do to bring it up a notch as our knowledge base, artistry, and technology has improved.
It was about trying to lean into that stuff, but there were other things [we wanted to change that had] been established in season one. For instance, the timelines. In season one, when we saw a timeline, there were these blue purple glowy strings that we would be flying through. The key directors Aaron and Justin, who were our directors for four of our six episodes and also acted as executive producers on the show, really had a very clear idea they wanted to avoid. One of the things that we joked about was that we were team “No glow”, because too many things glowed in visual effects. We tried very hard to reduce that and to make it feel much more analog and lo-fi and tangible.
They had this idea that they wanted the timelines to be rainbow-colored and something physical. I’m like, “Well, we’ve established that they’re blue and purple glowy lines in the previous show, so how do you transition from one to another?” We went to Trixter, the visual effects company who handled that task, and figured out a methodology and a logic. If you look at the timelines, for instance, on the left-hand side, they are blues and purples, and slowly they transition to the more tangible rainbow colors as the Loom is beginning to pull the timelines together. It was trying to never disregard what was done before, but to bring things to the level and to the place that visually we wanted season 2 to be.
It was the same with Miss Minutes. I think Miss Minutes was another character that had obviously been seen and loved and revered from season one, but we wanted to bring even more elegance to the animation, make it feel a little bit more tangible, as it were, and give her more empathy and more character. We were doing those kinds of things to try and bring it more up to date.
Townsend Exposes The Methods Behind Two Of Loki’s Signature VFX Techniques
My favorite effects moments from the whole show might be the Time Slipping. It looks fantastic. Can you talk about how that was done?
Chris Townsend: Time Slipping was something really, really fun. In the script, it has this line that says it looks like Loki is being torn from one reality to another and like he’s being born and dying all at the same time. [We asked], “How do you visualize that, and how do you visualize that in a regular TV show that’s not R-rated?” It’s something that everyone can watch, so how do you do it where it’s suitably gory, but suitably interesting? The quest, always, is that an effect is never seen before. We looked at long exposure photography, we looked at multiple exposure photography, we looked at paintings by Francis Bacon where you’ve got multiple faces in the same image, we looked at cubism, and we looked at all these classic interpretations of what time is and how you define it.
Using that as a basis, Framestore, the visual effects company that worked on that effect, came back with some concept art and mood boards. With that information, we slowly developed this idea. We had this idea of what we wanted to do with it. We didn’t quite know exactly how we’d fit the pieces together, but we knew that it would be multiple performances of Tom for Loki. So, we went to Tom and said, “Okay, we want to shoot a test.” We shot a test of him thrashing around in different poses in different ways, and then we took that back to Framestore and said, “What have we learned?” And we learned that bigger movements are better, or smaller movements, or slow, or fast. And with all that information, they then cut something together.
Then, we looked at that and said, “That’s pretty good. Now, what’s the next step?” And then we figured that we’d need to create a CG version of Tom for all of this so we could extract and simulate strands, because a lot of our effects are intertwined—excuse the pun—with our aesthetic of what time looks like. We had figured that we wanted to represent time always as strands, or lines, or threads, so we were trying to think of a way to connect that to time slipping. We decided to connect it with strands so that as he moves from one thing to another, there are strands of time being pulled.
Framestore rendered up those pieces and used flashes of the practical Tom with these CG interstitial bits, they showed it to us, and we said, “Great. Can we make it more gruesome?” So, they went in and hand-painted bulging eyes or the revealing of a skull just for fractions of a second. Once we’d done that, we showed it to the studio, we showed it to the directors, and we showed it to Tom, and everyone said, “Love it. It’s great. Let’s do that.”
Then, we had to figure out how to put that into production, because that process had been a monumental task. How would you put that into a schedule in terms of photography of shooting Tom so that you don’t disrupt the production schedule? One of the big practicalities of shooting is that we’ve only got two weeks to shoot an episode, and the last thing people want is visual effects to be holding them up.
We had to be able to figure out a way to do that. We got into a pretty efficient routine where, as soon as the directors were happy with the performance, we’d clear everyone off set. We’d shoot what we call a clean plate where we just shoot the background with no one there with the same camera, and then we’d bring Tom back on. We’d get him to perform, and I would direct him, “Saying, give us a thrust forward. Give me a twist, give me a lunge. Give me a slow, gentle version.” We would do 10 or 12 passes, and he was incredible. The intensity of performance that he was able to give us was brilliant, and that’s what sells it. So, I think it’s really a combination of everyone working together to create the effect.
Tom has played this character for so long. How much input is he giving on all of this?
Chris Townsend: He is Loki, right? He knows the character better than all of us. So, if you say, “Hey, we’d like to do this,” he’s like, “Loki wouldn’t do that. That isn’t how Loki would react to this.” He’s so incredibly passionate about the role, and that passion is infectious. He is listening and he’s incredibly respectful, but he will absolutely say, “No, this isn’t how it would go.” He’s great to work with.
And in regard to spaghettification, how much of that was scripted versus put together through storyboards? How did the look of that come together?
Chris Townsend:It all starts with the script. On the page it literally says that they turn into spaghetti, and a lot of it was based on the logic of if you stand next to a black hole, apparently you’d be pulled into strands. Whether it’s urban legend or real, I’m not quite sure, but it’s out there that this is what would happen in theory. We were using strings throughout to represent time, so in terms of the spaghettification, once we’d figured out what it looked like, one of the things that the directors really wanted was to make it feel as physical and tangible as possible, like you could almost get out and hold onto it. Many times, Loki’s character tries to grab hold of them, and they dissipate, or Sylvie’s character grabs hold, and they dissipate, but we wanted to make them feel physical—not just like glowy lines. A lot of it was basing it on what the photography was.
For instance, in episode 5, the record store scene, we pre-visualized the whole sequence. We worked out exactly what the camera moves were going to be and worked very closely with the directors. Framestore pre-vis did that. We cinematographically photographed the scene, and then we went in with still cameras, photographed everything, created textures, and scanned everything so we had full CG versions of the set and the characters and the actors.
Once we had that, we were able to transition between our practical photography and our CG version seamlessly. It was lit and rendered so it looked identical, and then we were able to start simulating the effect and start extruding the different parts of the CG set into these strands and pulling out the individual colors. Fortunately, in the record store, we had multiple colors because of all the album covers. You’ve got these beautiful reds and blues and yellows and greens all sort of coming and swimming past the camera, and it was about trying to put all that together without it looking like someone’s just vomited on screen. You want to always try and make it so that there is a design and an intent. We were trying to create something unique and elegant and told a story, but also looked surreal and weird and strange. It was a wonderful effect to play with.
Townsend Details How Loki VFX Ended Up In Deadpool & Wolverine
I just sawDeadpool & Wolverine, and it seems like a lot of the work that you all did repeats in that movie. What is the process of not only establishing what something looks like in the MCU, but also handing off assets and making it so future projects can pull on all of your hard work?
Chris Townsend: I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Marvel for many, many years. Everything is sort of mixed with everything else, everything is intertwined, and you never know which bits of what you create are going to be used elsewhere in other things. Some things just fall by the wayside, and the effect or the look or the design concept is never used again. Other times, it’s picked up in multiple shows and [projects]. So, you obviously have to be very careful when designing and thinking about these effects. They might last a long time, so you have to get it right.
You have to make sure that it will work, there’s a logic to it, and it’s not just satisfying the needs of your particular narrative or story point or moment. I say logic [in the sense of] cinematic logic—if a timeline is cut, then it means that you spaghetti. Fine. That’s our logic. That’s our base world. We would often question when somebody said, “Well, we want this to blow up.” You’d think, “It wouldn’t blow up. It would spaghetti, because it’s been cut.”
In this case, the Deadpool guys contacted us and said, “We are going back into the TVA and we’re going to be using timelines and spaghettification. Who did it? Can you give us the artwork? Can you show us?” We would give everything, and often they would go back to the same visual effects companies to do that work so that there is continuity. But, sometimes not. It’s interesting. There is a lot of thought that goes into these projects, whether they be film or television, and I think people think that things just happen, and they’re just happenstance. No–everything is very well considered, and I think that’s one of the really fun parts about working on these projects.
How Loki Season 2 Returned To Thor’s Tree Of Life
I want to talk about the end of the season. Loki’s “Glorious Purpose” scene is incredibly VFX heavy, which is… not risky, but a big undertaking. Can you talk about putting that together?
Chris Townsend: It was risky. We tried to make the show very lo-fi and analog. We tried to make it feel very tangible and real, and it was very grounded. We photographed things, we had ceilings on sets… all these things that often you don’t have, and that you often have to say, “Well, that’ll be visual effects.” Our shot count in this show was only just over 1,200 shots. The first season was 2,500 shots, so we had under half the shots. We very carefully collaborated with all the other departments—stunts, costume, hair and makeup, photography, set design—to say, “What we shoot is what we’re going to put on screen.”
We had taken that attitude throughout the entire season, and when we got to the end, it was like, “Okay, now we pull the plug on that. Now we are going into full CG world,” and, “Is this something that we can pull off? Is this a moment that has been earned? Is this the right decision?” Many, many months of discussion and concept art were done before we even shot it, trying to figure out what it was. We felt that it was a well-earned moment in Loki’s journey. He had, at this point, been in multiple films and had his own series, and this was the culmination of the second series. It was a well-earned moment, and we said, “Okay. We think we can pull this off,” but it was a very risky proposition within the aesthetic of the show.
We came up with this idea, based on Eric Martin’s script, of him climbing the stairs and being able to pull the timeline together, and it being a tree-like structure—that he’s a tree, and he’s holding it all together like a tree. I went back to look at the first Thor. When you fly out of the first Thor at the end of the movie, and you see Yggdrasil, it’s this spectacular moment. I can remember watching, thinking, “Wow, that’s incredible.”
So we went back to that and said, “Okay, let’s look at that. Can we embrace the aesthetic that was created there and recreate that within our own world, making it so that the tree of Yggdrasil is actually made up of timelines itself, and that’s what the Tree of Life is?” I think that that’s where we ended up. Again, Framestore was the company that undertook that.
With Tom’s performance, initially we tested out him holding onto pool noodles and ropes and pulleys and things to give him that tension, and we just couldn’t figure out a way of getting these things into his hands without him looking like he’s struggling to try and hold them. Eventually we said, “Now you understand the physicality of it. Can you mime it?” And he mimed it, and the performance he brought was spectacular. That final image, pulling out and seeing the tree… hopefully it will go down as a pretty iconic moment. I think it’s certainly one of the most beautiful images I’ve been a part of in terms of creating for the MCU. It’s something I’m very proud of.
Chris Townsend Shares A Favorite VFX Moment From Loki Season 2
Is that the moment from the season that you’re most proud of?
Chris Townsend: Honestly, there are so many. I think that the stuff, particularly in the last episode where Timely is walking out on the gangway and being shredded, is stunning, and there are so many shots in there that were a lot of work. It was all performance-based from what Jonathan Majors was doing on set, and it was with wind and cables holding him back to give him that performance, but what Trixster was able to do with the recreation of the suit… there are some shots in there that we look at and say, “That’s amazing,” and they’re like, “Yeah. It’s all CG.” The whole shot is CG other than the face, because we eventually had to replace so much of the costume.
The costume was built, and it was a beautiful thing, but we were showing the costume degrading, so you had to make some parts of it CG. In the first episode it’s primarily a practical suit that then got CG bits added, but when we got to the second part, we’d learned enough about the process and decided it was probably easier and better and more effective to make it a full CG suit. Trixster did that, and I think it’s a stunning sequence.
“There Isn’t An MCU Look”: Townsend Reflects On The MCU’s Visual Language
I can leave you with this one. Is there a style guide for the MCU for VFX that you all share and add to?
Chris Townsend: There isn’t. There isn’t an MCU look, regardless of what people out there say. I think Loki, in many ways, tried to step outside of what we usually gravitate towards in terms of the MCU. I think there is a tendency, because it’s comic books and superheroes, to go with slightly brighter colors that are more pungent and more vibrant, and we tried to lean against that. There’s a lot of brown in Loki to intentionally try and make it feel a little bit less bombastic. But there isn’t a style guide per se. I think everyone is trying to solve the problem that they have in front of them, and often there are similar issues, which is why there is a commonality between the shows.
About Loki Season 2
Along with Mobius, Hunter B-15 and a team of new and returning characters, Loki navigates an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous multiverse in search of Sylvie, Judge Renslayer, Miss Minutes and the truth of what it means to possess free will and glorious purpose.
Loki
Cast
Loki is a series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe following the alternate version of the titular character, Loki, after the events of Avengers: Endgame. Taken by the Time Variance Authority, he must confront his identity and choices while aiding in fixing the disrupted timeline to avert a greater threat.
