Titans Season 3 VFX Team Talk Biggest Challenges, Bringing Beast Boy and Starfire's Powers to Life, and More

Titans delivered a fantastic third season filled with heartbreaking scenes, delightful moments of humor, and explosive superhero action. The visual effects are a big part of why some of those scenes successfully dazzled fans, whether it was a literal explosion of a fan favorite (RIP), bringing Themyscira to magnificent life, or a transforming Beast Boy and everything in between. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak to Folks VFX Supervisors Gunnar Hansen and Brodie McNeill all about the season and the biggest and most challenging VFX moments throughout, and since the team starts off the show with a fight, we wanted to know which hero's power set ended up being the most challenging.

Hansen said, "That's such an interesting question there because I'd say from a technical standpoint, making a CG tiger, that's a difficult process, right?" McNeill added "We do all of that CG tiger building before the show really got into our hands. We had that ready to go. There were a few bumpy points, but then when we get into putting everything into the show, I don't know, Gunnar, would you say Starfire is one of the more difficult ones to do?"

"Yeah. I find that it's also quite difficult for the ephemeral effects as well because it's trying to make it not look too magical, and look like it's sitting in the real world," Hansen said. "Yet, it has life of its own, and it has a density of its own. Getting all of those things dialed in and making it work is always a challenge. Usually, it is driven by the shot itself. Sometimes you end up with a shot where the lighting is totally different, and you've worked on making these powers, or whatever, to have to sit in the shot and look like they're there. It's like, 'Okay, how are we going to adjust the lighting and atmosphere, and everything else, to make it look like it's really happening."

"Think about that shot when Starfire comes down in the orb of fire. That shot has so much going on in it. The orb of fires is its own thing. Her eyes are a separate effect, her hair, skin. Every single element is there, and all that stuff has to light the area around it. You know, she's on fire, so we have to keep her looking like the boss she is," McNeill said.

While they had time to prepare for Beast Boy's tiger transformation, that doesn't mean it wasn't a challenge to get it just right. "We knew about it from previous seasons, and we knew that we had to build that and make it look right," McNeill said. "I think we did a pretty successful job. The big question is, 'How green is too green?'"

"That's a huge challenge. You go too far, and he doesn't look like he's in the world. Again, it's always a fine balance. The other thing too is, the artists started getting excited and started trying different effects for Starfire, for example. One of the fun things too, we got to do some alternative super speed stuff in these episodes as well, for Superboy, which was a lot of fun. I think we're pushing it a little further than we usually did," Hansen said.

While there is no Flash on the team, Superboy's presence means you need to showcase super speed. While we've seen a bevy of takes on the super-speed effect, Titans' version has a style all its own, 

"Early on in the process, we have to figure out a way for him to realistically build stuff at hyper speed. The idea is you want to shoot a lot of footage, so you have a lot you can play with," Hansen said. "The one challenge was how to get the actor comfortable in saying 'Okay, you're going to be pretending to build something for five solid minutes, while the cameras are rolling.' There's that challenge. Making the actor comfortable, because they need direction when they are doing something that they have no idea how it's going to turn out. It's not a regular performance kind of thing. You have to guide them into the process. Of course, everybody's looking sideways, and wondering if this is going to work or not. The other thing too is, because it's television, and things move relatively fast, we didn't want to do a lot of blue screens or green screens. We just basically shot as-is, shot plates. Brodie did some tests, initially, with himself doing super speed."

Speaking of Superboy, one of the most shocking moments during the season is the death of Hank, who dies after Red Hood attaches an explosive to his heart. When we spoke to Joshua Orpin about that scene he described it as surreal because of everything that was going on around him in this very dramatic scene, and there were quite a few challenges to getting the scene to work.

"It was one of those big challenging scenes. Everybody's wondering, 'Are we going to have Pyro on the set?' Now, one of the things that came up is during COVID, in the beginning, well, we weren't allowed to have any smoke atmosphere on the set. They had CO2 meters there to check the carbon monoxide levels, or carbon dioxide levels, and stuff. When you're in an enclosed space, having particulate matter, it exacerbates the transport of the virus. We said, Okay, great. We can't have smoke in the room, and we can't have pyro or anything of fire, obviously. Then the other problem of course was light. Putting up a green screen, if we put up a green screen on a three or 180, like we did, we would have to light it, and then we have green spill."

"There are all these issues. We have reflective surfaces, and I just said, I'm fine with that. No worries. Just get a nice fat light in front of him when he arrives. We have the super speed event. Just waltz around him, we'll do cameras that are placed around the set to film him from other alternate angles," Hansen said. "We knew how the camera moved, so we were able to track the shot. Then we just built everything, and it was beautiful. It totally worked."

"Yeah. At that point, it comes down to this insanely talented group of effects artists that we have at the studio, who are able to basically create anything," McNeill said. "Raven and all of her new backgrounds with all of her powers. At that point, it came down to them producing this accurate fire simulation of an explosion going past, then seeding Superboy right into the middle of it for the rest of the explosion. It was a lot of iterations, and a lot of back and forth with the production. It came up pretty well in the end."

Season 3 also introduced Blackfire into the mix, and along with defining a power set that was similar but different enough from Starfire they also loved creating her costume.

"This is all coming from the showrunners and the writers. They had a very clear idea of where to go with differentiating their powers. This comes from the canon, from the comic books," Hansen said. "We were also trying to find something that would just look unique. Certainly for Starfire, in the beginning getting what her abilities and her powers look like, compared to what, eventually, we're seeing with Blackfire. One of the things we had a lot of fun with and got creative with was the suit, and how we managed to have that appear. We had a lot of creative input on that. We described it how we envisioned it, and they just let us take the ball and run with it. Again, the effects artists did an incredible job. We scanned all the actors. We have CG scans for them. We were able to place her in the scene, and just build this suit on top of her. That was great. That was a really fun scene, and turned out really well."

Titans Season 3 also introduced the show's version of Themyscira, a lush and beautiful location that boasted similarities to the movies and comics version but also stood apart as an original take.

"It was a fair bit of research to try to come up with something original to Titans," Hansen said. "Again, we had to work with the plates that we had, in the locations that we had, to try and minimize the scale of it. We wanted to set the scene for it, and make it look exciting and interesting for the audience."

"It took us quite a few iterations to get to where we were. It was a tricky balance of ensuring we're paying homage to the established looks in comics, and earlier films, but also making it specific to Titans, and specific to the location that we were shooting in. It took a little while to get to that right mix," McNeill said. "I feel it worked out pretty well after that. We had so much great material to pull from, from what the art department on set had set up for all the interior locations, too. There were so many interesting details in that temple that we could pull from for those bigger exterior shots.

Season 3 was Hansen and McNeill's first one on the series, so I had to ask if they could work on a dream character or get a chance to bring back someone from earlier seasons, who that would be.

"I'd eat up a chance to work on Trigon. That'd be fantastic," McNeill said. "Trigon's a good one. I'm trying to think of stuff that happened in the previous seasons, that we missed out on here. I know Gar turned into a snake. Was that in the second season? I'm always keen to try new animals."

"Yeah. That's a big one for me. Absolutely," Hansen said.

Hopefully, they get a shot at Trigon in a future season, but in the meantime, you can catch all of season 3 right now on HBO Max.

What do you want to see the VFX team make happen in season 4? Let us know in the comments or as always you can talk all things DC and Titans with me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!