She-Hulk: Attorney at Law wrapped up its first season earlier this fall, and it definitely left the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a unique spot. Fans were downright delighted to see the events of the show’s season finale, which saw Jennifer Walters / She-Hulk (Tatiana Maslany) break the fourth wall and come face-to-face with K.E.V.I.N., a robotic entity pulling the strings of the entire MCU. The robot was meant to be a clever homage to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige — and for VFX supervisors at Digital Domain, who helped bring K.E.V.I.N. to life, it was a unique challenge to translate the energy of the real-life man into a larger-than-life CGI character.
“Oh yeah, that’s scary, but it was pretty cool,” Digital Domain Animation Supervisor Elizabeth Bernard told ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview. “We dug up some old Comic-Con footage of him giving a 30-minute interview. We had that on our system, so that the animators could really dive in and see if they could find things that he did that made him feel like himself. One thing that we noticed was — he talks with his hands a lot, so we found a couple of unique ways that he would hold his hands together when he was making a point. And we ended up using that a lot in the K.E.V.I.N. sequence on the robot. We would often have visible claws come together and grasp one another. And of course, there’s the hat.”
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“The nice thing was we started this super early,” Digital Domain VFX Supervisor Jan Philip Cramer echoed. “I think most of us on the team were not thinking that this would be in the show, because it seems so bizarre. We then read the dialogue that was meant to happen and saw ‘Oh, it’s not just that they make fun of it visually. They make really fun of a lot of things in that sequence. Let’s see if that stays.” And it did. It was a really nice journey, because we helped from the very beginning. I think one of the first things we did, besides She-Hulk was we did K.E.V.I.N. We did some random animations of him, and they liked it a lot. Our idea was just this older robot that’s about to fall apart. We designed the room, [and] it’s meant to be like an old ’70s sports bar that was amazing at the time, but now it’s not so cool. There’s dust everywhere and scratch marks. Somebody got to clean this thing up, but he is in there and happy and all wired in. Over the months, we saw it always change and evolve, and then a year-and-a-half later or two years later, it was in the [series]. Unbelievable. Super cool.”
For Bernard, even the experience of telling new animators the secret of K.E.V.I.N. proved to be a delightful experience.
“Every time we would have a new animator join our team, I would give them a kickoff, and explain the plot and all the characters, and give them all the context for the show,” Bernard explained. “My coordinator on the show always liked the moment when I would drop the K.E.V.I.N. bomb in that kickoff meeting. Because the animators, most of them know who Kevin Feige is. A lot of us have worked on a bunch of Marvel projects before, and you would just see the jaw drop, or the eyes get big like, ‘What? What? What’s happening?’ It was so funny.”
The first season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is now available to stream exclusively on Disney+. If you haven’t checked out Disney+ yet and you want to give it a go, you can do that here.
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