Inside the VFX Magic That Brought Professor Orloff to Life in ‘Wednesday’ Season 2

Pictures: Netflix

The team behind Netflix’s Wednesday season 2 pulled off some incredible VFX magic throughout the production. One particularly impressive feat was Professor Orloff, a severed head floating in a jar of water, brought to life by the legendary Christopher Lloyd.

Christopher Lloyd has worked in some of the most groundbreaking productions in cinema history throughout his illustrious career — look no further than his role in the iconic Back to the Future movies. He also played Uncle Fester in the Addams Family movies from the 1990s. He returned to the Addams franchise for Wednesday season 2, but this time as Nevermore’s Professor Orloff, who is quite literally a severed head in a jar. 

Seeing Lloyd’s legendary expressions captured inside the jar was a joy for fans to behold. But the logistics of achieving it took a lot of behind-the-scenes work. The challenge fell to Netflix’s in-house teams, Eyeline Studios, and Scanline VFX. Together, they produced a final cut that had a stunning, photoreal effect.

Following the release of season 2, Netflix has released a behind-the-scenes featurette of the immense creative process. It features shots of Tim Burton directing Christopher Lloyd, as well as the genius team of Scanline VFX supervisor Derek Spears and Eyeline Studios’ supervisor Nhat Phong Tran. Check out the featurette below: 

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How was Christopher Lloyd’s ‘severed head in a jar’ effect achieved?

In the featurette, several members of the VFX team dive into exactly how Professor Orloff’s design made it to the screen, including the various trials and tribulations they encountered along the way, 

“Tom Turnbull, who’s the production visual effects supervisor for Wednesday, came to us because he’d seen the work that we’d done on One Piece,” Scanline VFX supervisor Derek Spears explained. “The visual effects team for that had done something very similar with, ironically, a floating head.”

“[Netflix] approached us to see if they can use our volumetric capture technology to solve that problem,” Nhat Phong Tran said, adding that alternative methods of VFX are not good enough to to justice to an actor’s work: “Traditional digi-doubles and green screen approaches often struggle to preserve the actor’s performance.”

Given that Netflix managed to enlist the expertise of Christopher Lloyd — an actor famous for his facial expressions — getting the expressions correct was imperative. As for how the team achieved this, Tom Turnbull helmed a team of industry experts, who utilise “an array of cameras that, in real time, photograph the actor from multiple different angles.”

This incredibly complex technique opened up a world of opportunity. “That allows us to build a geometry and a texture that marry together so we can relight and look at from any camera view with any scene.”

While filming on location, there was a 360-degree camera placed on set. The camera feed would then be played back in front of Christopher Lloyd in 360 degrees. “There was a 360 camera placed with the cameras as part of the principal photography. That 360 footage we loaded into the booth,” allowing Lloyd to act more naturally, as close to face-to-face with his co-stars as possible. 

Volumetric capture on this scale is becoming more and more predominant in Hollywood pictures nowadays, and Nhat Phong Tran believes it represents a big chunk of the future of filmmaking. “Volumetric capture is really disrupting the logistics of filmmaking. It opens up a lot of more creative avenues.”

Spears also echoed the same opinion. “It unlocks a freedom for the creatives to go and place that in a scene without worrying that they’re tying to mimic that performance,” he said. “This is a raw, exact copy as if it were photographed.”

Wednesday season 2 is now streaming on Netflix. Perhaps now you can watch it again with an added appreciation for the filmmaking process.