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To ground her storytelling while bringing something new to the fantasy genre, novelist Leigh Bardugo combined the elemental magic of Avatar: The Last Airbender with the Tsarist Russian setting of Doctor Zhivago to create Shadow and Bone. When adapting the trilogy for Netflix, creator Eric Heisserer made the inspired choice to interweave Bardugo’s companion books Six of Crows as the gang of resourceful criminals brings an Ocean’s Eleven vibe to the narrative. In Season 2, the fugitive Alina Starkov (Jessie Mei Li) is on a quest to find two creatures that may amplify her Sun Summoner powers enough to destroy the Shadow Fold while Kaz Brekker (Freddy Carter) and his crew attempt to settle an old grudge with vicious rival Pekka Rollins (Dean Lennox Kelly).
Series visual effects supervisor Ante Dekovic says he really appreciated having showrunners Eric Heisserer and Daegan Fryklind on set as they could provide feedback within hours so he could relay it to the vendors right away. “The good thing about having Eric and Daegan onset is you can immediately go into their video village and ask, ‘Does that work for you?’ Or they could come to me and ask me the same thing,” he says.
A different shooting methodology was adopted for interior of the Shadow Fold. “How do you show the Fold that it is massive?” Dekovic asks. “We always tried to have some sort of reference in the shot [like people or trees] so anybody watching gets an idea of its size. In Season 1, the interior of the Fold was shot inside of a studio. For season two, we decided to take it outside which made a lot of people nervous.”
Delving in Digital Magic
A big question was how to deal with practical light. Dekovic explains, “We did a few tests to smoke out the environment and see how far we can take it practically. Unfortunately, you’re always running against time when shooting and sometimes you can’t block off all of the sunlight that is coming in. Having it shot practically outdoors made a big difference to the look.”
Like the Shadow Fold, the creative ambitions for the eight episodes in the sophomore outing have expanded greatly and would not have been possible without the 1,800 visual effects shots produced by El Ranchito, Crafty Apes, Mackevison, Scanline VFX, Storm Studios and Vast. “It helped to have Eric Heisserer and everybody from Season 1 as well as having access to the assets, but we couldn’t use that many because we establish a lot of new things. For example, we didn’t have to change the volcra, the flying creatures [from the Shadow Fold].”
What did get a major upgrade are the nichevo’ya. “At the end of Season 1, there are three shots of the nichevo’ya and I was told, ‘Those are going to be the main creatures for a good part of Season 2,’” He recalls.
Smoke and effects simulations with water is one of the most challenging things to do in visual effects. “El Ranchito did a lot of R&D because it’s not just a smoke creature, it has character and you want to show certain expressions at particular times that with random simulation is always tricky. Mackevision figured out a good way to motion capture the movement of the creature and transfer that to a Houdini system they built which was reshared with Vast and El Ranchito. We could dial in more or less smoke. The hard part is when you block the animation without the smoke. The moment you turn on the smoke, things change and you have to go back and readjust it for every single shot.”
In Episode 202, one of the two remaining amplifier creatures is encountered in the caverns beneath an isolated island. “For the Sea Whip [a.k.a. the ice dragon] we used some drawings from the books as reference,” remarks Dekovic, who won an Emmy for his work on Star Trek: Discovery. “I gave some guidelines to Adam Wesierski, a concept artist at Mackevision. It needed to look amazing and terrifying. Mackevsion gave us five to seven different options and we picked the elements we liked. A few weeks later we got new version with all of those things combined.”
The Sea Whip is able to camouflage itself which heightens the suspense. “You want to keep it like the original Alien where you barely see the creature,” says Dekovic. “You play with the lighting and make the shots darker. The DI [Digital Immediate] helped us enormously by windowing things and having more emphasis on the eyes. We picked our Jurassic Park moments.”
Capturing the scene proved to be quite challenging. “We did shoot in a water tank, the set was fairly small, and we had to fit the creature in there so they didn’t see it, “ he recalls. “We were limited to a certain ceiling height because if the space is too big there is no danger, and if it’s too small the creature doesn’t fit. The first round of the set design the ceiling was too low but that got extended to make it more believable.”
Gearing Up for the Finale
Alina’s powers become stronger throughout Season 2. “Crafty Apes did the concept work for us to get an idea of how her powers can develop over the season,” explains Dekovic. “It took a few versions to get everybody onboard. You’re not blindly doing something cool. You have to tell the story, explain what’s going on and why certain things are happening. You have to make sure that the details are in there when you move from episode to episode. Everything connects to the big finale.”
The merging of Sea Whip’s scales with Alina leads to a sequence where the amplification might prove to be too strong for her to handle. “In the first season, they used a lot of interactive light onset for Alina’s powers but that created a lot of paintwork. We put a stop up on the camera so the exposure was higher to have the information in the plate. We shot at night so we had lot of light pollutions around it which helped. Scanline VFX did all of that work. I have to give Jessie Mei Li the biggest credit, because without her amazing acting we could have done the best visual effects in the world, but it wouldn’t have looked so good. Still, when I watch that scene, what sells it is everybody acting like she is bursting out in light. You can’t fake that in visual effects.”
Dekovic is excited for audiences to see what he and his team have worked on for many months. “Season 2 is what it needs to be,” he says. “It’s bigger, better and more dynamic, and it has more action. Most of the characters were introduced in Season 1, so now you can go on a big journey for all of the fans to enjoy. There are a lot of big things happening especially towards the end of the season. We have new sets, environments and creatures. You can tell by watching the show that special effects, stunts and visual effects all played very well together. The production gave us the freedom, because they trust us to do what we need to do. It’s a playground for everybody, and we were able to tell the story even better and bigger than it’s already written.”
Shadow and Bone Seasons 1 and 2 are now available to stream on Netflix.
