Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special Helped VFX Crew Complete Vol. 3 Work Faster

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 isn’t just the biggest comic book movie of the year so far, it also has some of the best looking visual effects of any film in 2023. James Gunn’s trilogy-ender has received plenty of praise for its VFX and artistic style, setting it apart from other recent Marvel Studios titles, such as Secret Invasion and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Getting a movie to look like that is already an impressive feat, but it’s made even more impressive by the fact that the VFX team had two projects to complete simultaneously.

Stephane Ceretti, the visual effects production supervisor for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, recently spoke to ComicBook.com’s Adam Barnhardt for the film’s home media release. Ceretti said that work on Vol. 3 and last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special happened at the same time. While that created a lot of work, the organization from Gunn and his editing team made the entire process operate smoothly.

“We shot it at the same time. There was roughly 100 days of shooting Guardians because James doesn’t do second unit, so he shoots everything himself, so that’s about 100 days. And then about 13 days of shooting all of the special kind of peppered throughout the thing,” Ceretti explained. “But then in terms of us, we had like 3000 visual effects shots on Guardians. We had 560 visual effects shots on the Holiday Special that we had to do at the same time. It wasn’t like, ‘Okay, we’re going to stop everything we’re doing on the film while we’re doing the special.’ We had to kind of do both of them together.”

Ceretti went on to say that certain elements of the Holiday Special actually helped move along work in Vol. 3, because different characters and locations were being used in both projects. 

“So our days were busy, but because James is extremely well organized and his editors are really good and they work really fast and they get it very quickly, we’ve been able to do the two at the same time,” Ceretti continued. “It was the period of time where we were doing both was very busy, and then it was very busy finishing the film too. But we balanced it quite well, I think. And everybody was so excited about the Christmas Special. It was so fun to do, and it helped us actually push some things a little bit faster, like all the extensions in Knowhere that we had to do, obviously Cosmo and the new Groot were in the Christmas special. So we had some extra energy to put onto that to develop that actually a little earlier than we would have maybe for the film. So that was good. That was a good exercise to do, and it turned out pretty fun.”

Both Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special are available to stream on Disney+. Vol. 3 is also available to purchase on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD.