Marvel's first Disney+ original series may be over, but the discussion surrounding it continues.
WandaVision's setting of a town trapped in an era-shifting sitcom caused by a witch's magic powers meant that a lot of visual effects were required to bring the show to life. Visual effects team members have spoken quite a bit about the effects developed for some of the show's most memorable scenes since the show ended.
Plenty has been said about Wanda Maximoff's powers and the various versions of Vision seen in the show, but now it has been revealed that visual effects work was needed for a surprising scene that doesn't appear to require any at first glance.
GETTING A-HEAD
In an interview with Befores and Afters, Trent Claus, one of WandaVision's visual effects supervisors, described how his team's skills were needed for one of the series' biggest moments. To perfect the scene in which "Pietro" shows up at Wanda's door at the end of the show's fifth episode, Claus' team digitally replaced Evan Peters' hair to more closely match the hair of past on-screen incarnations of Quicksilver.
Claus explained why it was "so difficult" to perfect the effect the show needed in order to match actor Evans Peters' head to that of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who played the MCU's real Pietro in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
“No one likes working with hair, it’s always so difficult. Here it was about adjusting to a certain style. For the shoot it had been bigger and fluffier, and they wanted it tighter, more streamlined. You see him from behind per several shots, and then you see him from the front for a few shots, and then you see it again in a later episode when they do the Agatha reveal.”
Claus also revealed that the effect was achieved as a 2D manipulation in the program Flame.
EFFECTS IN ODD PLACES
WandaVision has been said to have required more visual effects shots than Avengers: Endgame. Granted, a lot of those were simply to provide Vision's look, but this tidbit of information is an example of how visual effects are employed in all different kinds of scenes in shows and movies for a wide variety of reasons.
This particular example wasn't to add magic powers or flight effects to a scene but to add to the mystery factor of WandaVision. The project's creative team clearly wanted to keep viewers guessing about who was on the other side of the door until the very last second, and making Peters' head look like Taylor-Johnson's made the big reveal that much more surprising to fans.
All nine episodes of WandaVision can be streamed on Disney+.
