Black Panther: Wakanda Forever VFX Boss Reveals Surprising Fish Poop Details (Exclusive)

Those that work in visual effects on blockbuster films put tremendous care into their work. Whether it's rebuilding an existing island municipality digitally from scratch due to filming restrictions, or crafting a fictional town so that an Infinity Stone-powered witch can manipulate it at will, the best VFX work often goes unnoticed. When it comes to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and the introduction of the underwater Talokan, that means, believe it or not, filmmakers put a tremendous amount of care into how the fish poop floating about the fictional kingdom appeared on screen.

"If you want to talk about minutiae, we were literally discussing the shape of the fish poop that makes up all of the stuff that's floating around, and how we need to make sure that shape is correct," Wētā VFX supervisor Chris White tells us. "Because when the lighters light it and it's not the right shape, it doesn't look like underwater. We have a chart of which someone has modeled of the different shapes of poop that fish excrete, and then made millions of it that floats around them."

The technical name for the excrement, White adds, is called marine snow and it was someone's full-time gig at Wētā to make sure the poo—er, snow—looked just right.

"We had someone who was full time just doing that marine snow. What he did the entire film, was for every shot, making sure that it picked up with right motion and had the right character, and the density was correct, and it had the underwater current, and he got notes back on it as well on how to make it better," the filmmaker adds.

Now in theaters, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever follows Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), M'Baku (Winston Duke), Okoye (Danai Gurira) and the Dora Milaje (including Florence Kasumba) as they fight to protect their nation from intervening world powers in the wake of King T'Challa's death. As the Wakandans strive to embrace their next chapter, the heroes must band together with the help of War Dog Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o) and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and forge a new path for the kingdom of Wakanda.  It has yet to be seen where the Midnight Angels tie into the story.

Introducing Tenoch Huerta as Namor, king of a hidden undersea nation, the film also stars Dominique Thorne, Michaela Coel, Mabel Cadena and Alex Livanalli.