Tony Hale’s Mr. Nicholas Benedict and his associates returned to the streaming screen this past fall. Disney+’s The Mysterious Benedict Society began airing its sophomore season in October, wrapping its latest eight-episode batch last month, leaving fans with a big tease that could unfold in a potential Season 3. While a third installment has yet to be confirmed, The Mysterious Benedict Societyย made sure to up the ante when it came to its second season’s production, and it wasted no time in showcasing those fresh elements.
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Season 2’s James Bobin-directed premiere featured The Shortcut, a massive ocean liner that a bulk of the show’s main characters find themselves on in the early episodes.ย
Speaking to ComicBook.com’s Liam Crowley, FuseFX CG Supervisor Bryan Reif revealed that The Mysterious Benedict Society‘s Shortcut was modeled after a famous real-life ocean liner.
“We based it off the Queen Mary, which is docked in Long Beach, but they were very clear that they did not want it to be the Queen Mary,” Reif detailed. “They wanted it to be its own unique ship, The Shortcut. They made all these adjustments on set where they set dressed it and put different logos and they changed the colors and added a whole bunch of stuff to it, and then we took that and ran with it.”
To achieve that unique Shortcut, Reif added that his team made alterations to some of the Queen Mary’s feature.
“We went down to Long Beach and Turlock took lots of photos of the actual Queen Mary, but then we started manipulating and changing it, coming up with our own design styles,” Reif continued. “Just creating its own version of this transatlantic ocean liner from the past, a romanticized version of that.”
Even after all assets were in place, digitally creating The Shortcut proved to be only half the battle.
“Recreating the Atlantic Ocean was a challenge because we have this boat, but now it has to actually be going through the ocean,” Reif added. “And for that we needed to generate just terabytes upon terabytes of fluid simulation data that we could use to create splashes and wakes and waves and foam and everything else that happens when you plow an ocean liner through the ocean.”
These elements all came together to birth something that “had never been done.”
“We had to make it seem like this thing was flying through the ocean because it was supposed to be the fastest ship, and we had to do that all in a computer basically,” Reif continued. “That and we had to create a dirigible, which is a kind of a flying air ship, but in a completely unique. The size of it was something that had never been done. We couldn’t base it off of anything that was actually built. We had to invent it as we went.”
What Reif and his team came up with in the end had its fair share of areas of inspiration, but the bulk of the final product was their brainchild.
“As you’re ramping up and as you’re getting into the meat of production, you realize we have ideas but they’re not finished,” Reif said. “Disney was really good in allowing us to be creative and put our own design aesthetics into it and have a lot of creative input, which was great because not all clients would allow that. They were really open to do that.”
The Mysterious Benedict Society Season 2 is streaming in full on Disney+.
