VFX and prosthetics team breaks down zombie character in ‘Wednesday’ season 2 - shares how CGI was used in the show

‘Wednesday’ season 2 brought with it an onslaught of new and original characters that the fans could not seem to get enough of. One such character was ‘Slurp’, or Isaac Night, who was revived from the dead by none other than Wednesday’s brother, Pugsley. The zombie character is a new addition to the small-screen show and has been praised for how realistic the effects looked.

VFX and prosthetics

designers from the show recently broke down how they brought these characters to life.

VFX and prosthetics team breaks down ‘Slurp’ and Professor Orloff in ‘Wednesday’ season 2

Tristan Verslius

, the prosthetic designer for the show, delved into how the zombie was brought to life in a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter. He revealed that, “Very early on, when the first drafts of the script were being made, there was a conversation of Slurp needing to be a practical actor in makeup”. Delving more into the creation of ‘Slurp’, he shared that the team used a lot of different zombie caricatures as well as designs created by the design team to find out which felt the most fitting for ‘Wednesday’.‘Slurp’ transforms throughout the show as he consumes one brain at a time. To show this transformation slowly, Verslius revealed that “When the bodyactor [Painter] was confirmed, we took that design and applied it to him, as it were, on Owen’s face and then we started going stage by stage, really. We made stage one first and we tried to figure out how to get to stage three, and what stage two was and how that journey takes place”.

VFX supervisor Tim Turnbull also shared that while CGI was used a lot more in the early presentation of ‘Slurp’, the need to do so became less and less as the character took on a more solid shape representing Isaac Night.

Complications with Professor Orloff’s floating head

The team also revealed how one of the most challenging parts of the show was creating Professor

Orloff

as accurately as possible in the show. The professor is shown as just a floating head in a jar and a machine that was earlier built by Isaac Night to keep him alive. While Turnbull shared that earlier they would have used a green screen to show a floating head in a jar, however, they wanted to go a step further and share a more realistic vision of the professor at Nevermore. He revealed that they had to use new and complicated technology to capture a “4D volumetric capture of Lloyd’s performance”, meaning that everything on the screen was the actor, with minimal CGI added to make it realistic.