WandaVision: VFX Supervisor Marion Spates Details the White Vision Process

There was a whole lot of excitement in WandaVision‘s finale, which was released on Disney+ last month. The episode saw everything from fierce battles to heartbreaking goodbyes with a whole lot of cool moments in-between. Recently, ComicBook.com had the chance to chat with Marion Spates, a VFX Supervisor who works for Digital Domain. The company worked on some of the episode’s biggest effects, including Scarlet Witch’s costume. They were also responsible for a lot of the complicated work that went into creating White Vision. Here’s what Spates had to say about the process and working with two versions of Paul Bettany…

“It’s always really difficult to put a white character in a low lit or even a very hard sunlit environment,” Spates explained. “So we had to very strategically dial in his white. I mean, obviously, we would just lean into his white, because his costume is white. As we’re dialing in capes and heads, we would lean into what he looked like with his actual outfit. We had this really cool effect … Do a very thin film interference layer to his face. When you look at a bubble at a certain angle, how you have that rainbow effect, so we introduced that and you would primarily see it in his specularity as his head would move. We leaned into that a lot, which helped. It’s not super present. It’s just there. And it also gives a little bit of color variation obviously to the whiteness of his costume, which was really nice.”

“As far as the development of both, Marvel has come up with the concept for the White Vision and the Red Vision,” Spates added. “White Vision obviously being a new character, so we knew we would take Red Vision and transform into a light Vision. We just started with red and developed that into white. We started with concept artwork that we received from Marvel. Marvel actually created his whole costume. They did a really nice job on that. One thing we did find out as we were diving into the plates and things, we started to augment the color of his white a little bit. There were a little bit more off colors. So we did a little bit of augmenting to the actual suit of himself.”

“With White Vision, we scanned him,” Spates continued. “On set, we would just completely scan so we have the full body, so then we bring the body back. While we’re there, we shot high-resolution photography of the suit with Paul in the suit. We also did some details with the stunt double as well, so that way we wouldn’t take up too much of Paul’s time. With the head, it was a little bit of a trickier, because we don’t have a head on set that we can stand or photograph. So we then took that head, the concept head that Marvel has come up with. We start with the Red Vision’s head, we take it into ZBrush, and then what we do is we sculpt really quickly what this new White Vision head could look like by taking a Red Vision and putting in the details of the White Vision.

Spates concluded, “White Vision, you had much more angular edges to him, right? Because he’s more stoic. His character himself was much more stoic. Paul, even when he would act as White Vision, he did an amazing job. The stoicism of him. He was even a slightly different character on set because he leans into the character that he’s being at the moment. It was really a stunning experience to actually see the way that he was able to turn the switch on from a Red Vision to White Vision. That was inspirational to all of the team.”

Stay tuned for more from our interview with Spates where he talks about Chaos Magic, creating The Hex, and more.

WandaVision is now streaming in Disney+.