The Fantastic Four: First Steps VFX Reel Breaks Down the MCU Movie’s Best Scene (And Reveals What Was Fake)

The Fantastic Four: First Steps, like every other Marvel Studios production, is filled with visual effects in almost every shot. 2025’s new reboot of Marvel’s first family also had to contend with delivering complex animated characters, using performance capture from actors on set, and animating some completely from scratch, based on movement references and vocal performance. When you combine all that with the retro-future alternate Earth that the film is set on and you have a movie that needed an extensive post-production timeline.

ComicBook has an exclusive look at a VFX reel for the movie from Framestore, one of the vendors that contributed to visual effects on The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Not only does Framestore’s video reveal exactly how they created key sequences with Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Ben Grimm, but it also details how they created the very best sequence in the movie itself: the hyperspace travel chase with the Silver Surfer.

Framestore compositor Jay Murray was inspired to create the film’s warp drive system by taking his interest in cocktails and combining it with sci-fi concepts. According to Framestore‘s case study on the effects, Murray considered the idea of traveling through a martini glass stem.

“I grabbed a glass, took out my phone and started experimenting, looking through a bunch of different types of glasses at space themed imagery on my TV,” he revealed.

VFX Supervisor Rob Allman reiterated their unique take on showing off space travel in the film by adding, “The idea is that our Fantastic Four ship is really static, with the space moving and rotating around them, rather than our ship jumping through space.”

The video above also details major moments of this sequence, along with the birth of Franklin Richards in space right after, that show off just how much of the movie isn’t even being captured in-camera and what was replaced afterward. One of the most surprising elements of this is Franklin himself, as the video shows a real baby used on set, which was then fundamentally changed in post-production with visual effects. Furthermore, scenes of the team piloting the ship from the cockpit reveal how small the set really was, showing that the rest of the ship behind them was simply…a blue wall.

Finally, the video also details two of the movie’s biggest pure CGI characters. Ebon Moss-Bachrach not only used a motion capture suit and facial capture rig to play The Thing, but he’s such a big piece of the movie that multiple animation studios had to handle bringing him to life for the movie. According to Framestore, Marvel held twice weekly phone calls with all the vendors working on The Thing so that all parties could be in the loop with regard to any notes given to relevant shots for the ever-loving, blue-eye’d hero.

On the flipside, Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer did not utilize motion capture rigs at all by the VFX teams. You may find a stand-in appear briefly in one shot in the above video, but instead Garner’s character was “completely keyframe animated.” Though they had a video reference of Garner’s performance, the team had to make her expressions far more muted than she would look on camera. The other big problem of course was the way light interacted with a fully reflective character like Silver Surfer, a challenge that “took much longer than the others in the film,” according to Allman.

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