Loki Season 2’s Emmy-Nominated VFX Supervisor Chris Townsend Talks Time Slipping, Deadpool & More
Summary Loki season 2 marked a potential endpoint for Tom Hiddleston’s God of Mischief, and its three Emmy Award nominations make it clear that the hard work that brought the show to life has been recognized. The Disney+ series has always been an awards contender, with the first season also garnering a number of nominations.
Chris Townsend Discusses Elevating The Aesthetic Of Loki Season 2 Screen Rant: I love the visuals and the aesthetic that were created for Loki season 1, and I feel like season 2 managed to improve on those. What did you want to lean into coming into season 2 as someone who wasn’t involved in the first season?
They had this idea that they wanted the timelines to be rainbow-colored and something physical. I’m like, “Well, we’ve established that they're blue and purple glowy lines in the previous show, so how do you transition from one to another?” We went to Trixter, the visual effects company who handled that task, and figured out a methodology and a logic.
Using that as a basis, Framestore, the visual effects company that worked on that effect, came back with some concept art and mood boards. With that information, we slowly developed this idea. We had this idea of what we wanted to do with it. We didn’t quite know exactly how we’d fit the pieces together, but we knew that it would be multiple performances of Tom for Loki. So, we went to Tom and said, “Okay, we want to shoot a test.
We had to be able to figure out a way to do that. We got into a pretty efficient routine where, as soon as the directors were happy with the performance, we’d clear everyone off set. We'd shoot what we call a clean plate where we just shoot the background with no one there with the same camera, and then we'd bring Tom back on. We’d get him to perform, and I would direct him, “Saying, give us a thrust forward. Give me a twist, give me a lunge. Give me a slow, gentle version.
Once we had that, we were able to transition between our practical photography and our CG version seamlessly. It was lit and rendered so it looked identical, and then we were able to start simulating the effect and start extruding the different parts of the CG set into these strands and pulling out the individual colors. Fortunately, in the record store, we had multiple colors because of all the album covers.
In this case, the Deadpool guys contacted us and said, “We are going back into the TVA and we're going to be using timelines and spaghettification. Who did it? Can you give us the artwork? Can you show us?” We would give everything, and often they would go back to the same visual effects companies to do that work so that there is continuity. But, sometimes not. It’s interesting.
We came up with this idea, based on Eric Martin's script, of him climbing the stairs and being able to pull the timeline together, and it being a tree-like structure—that he's a tree, and he's holding it all together like a tree. I went back to look at the first Thor. When you fly out of the first Thor at the end of the movie, and you see Yggdrasil, it's this spectacular moment. I can remember watching, thinking, “Wow, that's incredible.
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