The gods swapped ancient Greece for New York Comic Con 2023.
This year, Disney+ brought Percy Jackson and the Olympians, its new show based on the globally popular book series of the same name by Rick Riordan, to the Big Apple.
The panel featured appearances from the creative team behind the show, including Executive Producer and Showrunner Jon Steinberg, Executive Producer Dan Shotz, Production Designer Dan Hennah, Costume Designer Tish Monaghan, VFX Supervisor Erik Henry, VFX Supervisor Jeff White, and the director of the first two episodes, James Bobin.
The Disney+ series has been in the works since 2020 and will follow the titular protagonist as he reckons with the repercussions of his father’s identity: Poseidon. The series stars Walker Scobell as Percy alongside actors Virginia Kull, Megan Mullally, Jason Mantzoukas, and Lance Reddick – the last television role the actor filmed before his passing earlier this year.
After Zeus’ lightning bolt goes missing, the blame is placed on Percy, who must prove his innocence by tracking down the powerful weapon. Alongside friends Grover and Annabeth, Percy will adjust to his demigod powers as he treks across the United States to restore order to Olympus. The new series aims to be much more faithful to the books than the previous film adaptations of the series, with author Rick Riordan serving as a producer on the show.
After the panel, The Koalition spoke to VFX Supervisors Jack White and Erik Henry to learn more about the creation of the series special effects.
From a VFS perspective can you talk about the super intense car scene featuring a Minotaur? What were the planning and creation process like?
“The Minotaurs are so important to everyone. I don’t know how many discussions we had about the underpants and what happens when they get wet. They’re going to get dirty; are they dirty enough? Then they became too gray, and it’s like, ‘Well, we got to pop out.’ Those are kind of the interesting discussions where you turn to your colleagues and say, This is a weird discussion we’re having, yeah. But adding anything to the complexity of it, Jeff’s team is the one who brought it to screen. There are some amazing shots. I was asked recently, ‘What my favorite shot was?’ It’s definitely one of the hero moments when the Minotaur person gets on top and snaps the horn off. The camera move we came up with is really dynamic. You move around the face; he’s in pain, and so the minotaur’s mouth opens up as you come by, and he puts the horn in. As everyone knows who’s read the book that makes them dissolve, and then Percy falls through it. All of that dynamic work is just beautiful by the ILM team headed by Jeff and Jose. It’s framed with the tree and the background and the moonlight; it’s perfect; it’s a perfect shot,” said Erik.
“One of the things I loved about working with Eric, John, and Dan was that there can be a temptation with the fight with the CG creature where it’s just so fantastic that it starts to not feel real anymore. There’s no stake, and you never feel like there’s any danger. We spent a lot of time carefully crafting this sequence, so you actually felt Percy was in real danger, and when the moment happens with his mom, it’s very emotional in the show. That part of it was almost more of a focus than just executing the creature, which I thought in the end made it feel a lot more realistic,” said Jack.
Water is a very important part of Percy’s character; can you talk about the water effects we’re going to see?
“His first foray into it is in the bathroom scene. We have so many, but it’s the first time you start to get a hint of who Percy is. It’s very subtle, but when Percy approaches her, there’s actually water tentacles that grab her from the back, and we kept it intentionally. They look exactly the same as all the rest of the water from the fountain, which we had to recreate the Metropolitan Museum of Art fountains. We learned a lot about them; they go through a substantial amount of water, and they’re able to pump through those things, so the fact we were able to recreate it on our set was really phenomenal. Joel, the special effects team, went into making that fountain. It’s a stunning achievement. We had to shrink it a little bit because the actual one is so big. There’s two we had to shrink to make it fit on the volume, and I think the actual one was $50 million, so that would have used up almost our entire production budget for visual effects. You have to make some cheats, but doing magic is quite tough. It can be a lot of exploration. How do we make this feel natural? And that’s where we just had a lot of back-and-forth discussions in terms of how Percy starts to harness the power of the water, and it builds over the course of the show. If you get to the point where you feel like, ‘Yes, that’s one of his powers, but it doesn’t look like a weird mystical thing; it still feels very grounded,’ said Jack.
How much room was there for creativity because you have the source material that you’re drawing all this inspiration from, Greek mythology and creatures? People already have an idea of what they should look like right but how much freedom was giving in creating them?
“The hard part is you have amazing source material on the page, but what does that look like in real life? The Minotaur is a good example of where it was just one illustrator that came up with the idea of using like a Brahma B as a way to shift Minotaurs into a little bit of a different language because they have those floppy ears that hang down. How do we make this thing scary and a threat to Percy but not so scary that all the kids go screaming from the room and give it character? John and Dan were really keen to have it have a backstory. It’s got pierced ears; someone did that. It seems more badass. Those are the kind of things John and Dan are so helpful with because they are not those kinds of showrunners who just say, ‘I don’t know.’ They are very specific and always have some point of reference. Creativity comes from sitting with those two for 10 minutes, and all of a sudden, you’re riffing on ideas, and it’s where we came up with the fact it wasn’t going to run when it’s standing on two legs because it just is more threatening if it’s on all fours running at you like a steam train. When it stands up, that’s more combat mode, and that’s when swinging and grabbing happens. That’s when it’s going to hold Sally up and finally crush her back,” said Erik.
To learn more about Percy Jackson and the Olympians, check out the full interview below.
