“Yellowjackets” – Visual Effects Artist Marshall Richard Krasser on Creating the Show’s Cold and Cannibalistic World [Interview]

The following contains major spoilers for Season 2 of Yellowjackets. 

With a thrilling sophomore season, Showtime’s Yeliowjackets has cemented its place among the year’s best television. Picking up two months after Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) devastating death, the show’s 90s timeline reunites us with the stranded soccer players now struggling to survive in the dead of winter. The highly anticipated season premier ends with a shocking act of cannibalism: desperate for food, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) impulsively pops Jackie’s severed ear into her mouth an instant before the credits roll. This appetizer of sorts is followed by a failed attempt to cremate the former captain’s remains and a jaw-dropping midnight feast in episode 2. After another gruesome meal, the season concludes with a disastrous fire that forces the survivors into the snowy wilderness as their cabin refuge burns to the ground. 

Bringing these complex sequences to life required a delicate blend of practical effects and digital imagery. Visual Effects Supervisor Marshall Richard Krasser and his FuseFX team went to great (and often disturbing) lengths to heighten the tension with grisly verisimilitude. Bloody Disgusting sat down with the veteran digital artist to talk about perfecting the team’s wintery world and cooking up the right balance of reality and gore for those disturbing cannibal scenes. 

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BD: Going into Season 2, I suspect a large portion of the audience, myself included, were thinking about one thing: cannibalism. How did you approach depicting that horrific buffet in Episode 2? 

MRK: We talked a lot with Kent O’Connor, who was the studio-side VFX supervisor, and Lynne Whitlock who was the editor. We discussed it all the way up the ranks in terms of what they were anticipating. They did end up shooting the body and when they got it on film it didn’t quite have the juiciness that they wanted. So they tasked us with coming up with a way to make it look like it was so appetizing that there’s no way any of the survivors wouldn’t be pulled in and start to eat. We went out and started looking for references of roasted stuff. We looked at a roasted turkey for the skin look, but ultimately, we ended up with a roasted pig look, like a whole pig. My understanding is that pigs and humans, the skin is very similar. I will say I just hope nobody ever looks at our Google search histories. [Laughs] Anybody in visual effects, we look up stuff that normal people don’t look up, like charred bodies, roasted bodies and burned bodies. It was not for the faint of heart. [Laughs] Our guiding task was to find a way to help augment the bodies and just take it to that next level of tastiness.

BD: It’s so well done and such a fascinating scene. We’ve watched these characters suffer in the wilderness for an entire season. We’ve grown to really care about them and we want to see them eat!  You can tell that they’re consuming human flesh, but it’s shot in a way that doesn’t vilify the survivors. This magical fire almost seems to invite them to the table. 

Yeah, we did some augmentation to that. We did add additional snow on some of the branches that fell down and yeah, she did get buried. We had to make a little bit more of the mound and add fire to that as well to make it look like she was encased in an oven, so to speak; cooked. It’s interesting, if you noticed, what is their initial reaction? What wakes them up? What whets their appetite? It’s actually the smell. They smell the cooking and it activates their survival system to where they’re like “I’ve got to eat.” It goes to the more primal area of the brain that defies logic. Psychologically I thought that was a very unique approach to take to it, a very successful approach.

BD: How did you create the look of the body and the ear that Shauna eats? 

For the actual body, they had a mannequin, but there were a couple of things we did have to augment. They felt the neck was too long. So we shortened the neck and rebuilt some aspects of it. We basically just built upon what was already shot. That means you have to build a model and track it so that we could do some projection. We did some digital map painting work to do the skin along with photographic references and painting. As far as the ear was concerned, initially, when they were shooting it they were trying to tape the ear back down, so it wasn’t sticking out as much. It didn’t end up working too well. So they ended up just having the ear there. What that meant is we basically had to remove the ear and then they had a little rubber piece that was a cast of her ear. We were able to take that and do some photo modeling, because they would photograph that from several angles. We built the broken earpiece model. Once we removed it, we put the partial there. 

As far as the other body parts, the only thing we did augment a little bit was some of the hanging bear carcass. They felt it still had too much meat on it and they were trying to sell the idea that [the survivors] were running out of food. So we came in and augmented that by stripping out the flesh and putting more rib bones in there just to help sell the idea that they’re going to be hurting here really soon.

BD: In addition to a lack of food, the girls also have to contend with a brutal winter. There’s heavy snow on the ground throughout season 2. How did you create such a ferocious environment? 

Yeah, there’s a lot of [snow]. So they shot a lot of that in Vancouver. They would go up to some of the mountain peaks around the area to shoot for snow. In cases like that, we had to paint out some snow runs in the background that you can see on the hills. We had to winterize it a little bit. Of course, pretty much all of the falling snow aerial shots, that was all augmented by our effects team. 

Also the cabin set. It was on a soundstage and they did have the artificial snow around. What we mainly were doing was adding drifting, drift mounds, and of course the falling snow. Then we basically helped open up the forest. When I say open up, we extended the forest so you could see that there was a lot more stuff back there than just the few set trees. They were on a soundstage and a blue screen for most of it. So whenever they’re in the snow, when they come up to the cliff, that was all blue screen. The wide view as she’s dumping the bucket over the edge, basically that’s been replaced with some plate photography and the digital map painting and rebuilding that whole environment. And again, adding the falling snow. 

For the breath stuff, Lynne the editor, they gave us a previs so to speak, of where they wanted the breaths. Then it was just a matter of putting them in there, getting the right field, the right size, the right speed based upon what they were doing. I laugh because I actually worked on the movie Rent (2005) years ago and it was the same type of thing. Rent was shot on a soundstage that Fahrenheit-wise was like 80-90 degrees inside, but it was supposed to be in the cold of New York, so it was a lot of adding breath. There are a lot of tricks that you learn when doing breaths. What enunciates it? How do you know where to put it? How strong should it be? What we came up with was just to hold your hand over your mouth and as you talk, that’ll tell you which particular words have the stronger accent. You had to determine what they were saying also to determine what kind of breath characteristic you would have. A lot of that was behind the scenes, trying to make sure we had the right type of elements.

BD: Is there a difference between the breath that you would create for a speaking voice versus a singing voice?

There is a little bit. If anything it’s probably a little more forceful belting it out, but it’s the same concept. You do have to change it up a little bit. It’s not quite the same. 

BD: In addition to the snow, we also see the return of the white moose!

As far as the moose is concerned, our sister company did the actual moose aspect of it so the only thing we really were involved with there is we had some scenes when Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) was tracking it and found footprints. So basically, we pan around and see where it goes. Where do you get moose prints? Well, we’re in Canada. [Laughs] I have a remote property that I have access to and actually was able to find those prints. For a case like that we shot a lot of references so that we know exactly how a moose print would look. We augmented it with digital matte painting, to get it in there. Because as much as we could get in camera or shoot real stuff, the better off you’re going to be instead of trying to paint. Kent shot a lot of elements for us. If we needed something, he would set it up and shoot us elements that we could use like some of the breath and fire elements. He was very accommodating, and very helpful. I just want to reiterate that. Kent was our savior on a lot of stuff like that.

BD: What drives you to want to perfect all of those tiny details?

Because if it wasn’t there, in your mind, even though you might not be able to put your finger on it, you would realize that something wasn’t quite right. Someone would say “where’s their breath? They’re not out there. They’re on a set!” You need to sell the idea that they’re out there by the breath so that people don’t start saying, “Well, wait a minute, are they on a stage?” If somebody starts thinking that, then you pull them out of the story. So you really need those little details in there to let the storyteller hold on to the audience, to keep their focus and not be looking around like, “oh my gosh, there’s a Starbucks coffee cup sitting over there in the background!” which has happened on a certain show recently. It’s the details that if it wasn’t there we would notice it.

BD: The season finale contains more than a few shocking moments. Just when we think everything has settled down, we see this heartbreaking fire and it’s followed by this breathtaking zoom out that shows a massive wilderness covered in snow. The season ends with this harrowing reminder of just how isolated they really are. 

Yeah, that end sequence. Richard Greenwood is another one of our visual effects supervisors. He stepped in to take over that sequence because he has dealt with that type of work before. They shot the initial pull back of the cabin with the blue screen so that locked us into a set move. Then Kent went out on location again and shot drone footage and we tried to line it up. He did a really great job. He shot several different passes and locations. We found one that seemed like it would work the best. So basically, we go from this stage camera, pull back the stage set, then transition and lift up again, and pan up to see the whole scope. There was a lot involved with that shot. 

The cabin was set on fire on stage so it was burning. We did have to augment it because they didn’t have the whole cabin built. There was some additional flame and smoke being added to that as well. When you pull that back you’ve got to pull out the plume. It goes basically from real flame through to CG flame and smoke. Initially around the blue screen we had recreated this 3D set so we created a 3D forest around it with bushes in the snow. The actresses were all standing a little too far back because of the fire so we had to break above the plate and move up closer to the fire. There’s a lot of stuff going on out there that you don’t see. The interaction with the forest, the 3D stuff, lighting and everything else in the snow. It was a very complicated shot that basically came down to the wire.

BD: What are you most proud of when you look at the finished product? 

Oh, boy. That’s really hard to say. I think overall we had a variety of work and I wouldn’t say that one stood out over the other. I think what we were probably the proudest is if we do our job right you don’t know that we did our job. If people are going “wait a minute, that’s an effect” you feel disappointed because you feel that you’ve not been able to execute as well as you should have. The cabin work, the fire work, that’s all great stuff. The environmental work just to help them open up the story, set the world, and help them establish where things are. It’s a cumulative thing. I can’t pick a favorite. [Laughs]

BD: I want to zoom out just a little bit and ask what drew you to effects work to begin with?

Well, I’m gonna date myself here a little bit. I was probably about 15 when Star Wars [Episode IV – A New Hope] came out. I grew up in Springfield Missouri, the Ozarks, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do someday. I wanted to work on a Star Wars movie. As the long and winding road took me there, I ended up in San Francisco working at Industrial Light & Magic for almost 19 years. I did get to work on the special edition Star Wars: [Episode VI] – Return of the Jedi, and [Star Wars: Episode V] – The Empire Strikes Back. I actually got to redo some of the shots that sucked me in as a kid when they did the remastering. Then I got to work on [Star Wars: Episode II] – Attack of the Clones as well when it came out and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. So, for me it was just the movies. It was the storytelling that pulled me in. I liked doing the effects aspect of that. I was an art major in university and also took computer programming, because I could tell even in the early 1980s that was the direction things were gonna go and so I tried to set myself up to get into that. The first film I worked on (I did not receive credit though) was Forrest Gump. Interestingly enough, the first film that I got a film credit on was Casper.

BD: With Christina Ricci again, wow!

… with Christina Ricci! The shots I did were when Casper flew in, brought a little glass, and gave it to her to hold. Here’s one of the glasses from the set! 

BD: That’s so cool. Since we are a horror site, I could make an argument that Yellowjackets is horror and that Casper is at least horror adjacent. [Laughs.] I noticed that you have some other horror credits in your resume like The Mummy, War of the Worlds, and The Walking Dead. Are you a horror fan and do you enjoy working in the genre?

I like a wide variety of genres. I don’t go out and seek [horror]. I personally prefer photorealistic stuff, like the work we did on Pearl Harbor. There was something about having to recreate the horror of war, so to speak. But, I’m not someone who says, “Oh, give me that gruesome, gory stuff.” In The Walking Dead, there was one thing we did where the eyeball popped out of one of the heroes and it needed some augmentation. So we augmented it and sent it to them. And they go, “Oh, that’s too much!” We went to 4 on that. It’s the same way with The Mummy and Stephen Sommers. We always had the Steve-o-meter. [Laughs] He was like “you never go far enough. You go from 1 to 10, but you give me 4. You never go to 10 or 12 or 15.” So I gave him a shot that I think broke him. [Laughs]. He said, “Okay, you guys have gone too far.” [Laughs] But I think that’s the key with anything, sometimes you have to go too far and rein it in. But when they’re like, “Okay, no, no, no, that’s a little too graphic.” It takes them out of the story a little too much.

BD: Is there anything you can tease about Yellowjackets Season 3? I also saw that you worked on Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies!

I worked on The Pink Ladies as well! Totally different genres. Talk about a horror movie. [Laughs] 

BD: Hey, there’s singing in both. [Laughs] 

We still don’t know [about Yellowjackets]. We would love to be involved with season 3. I’m not sure where they are in the planning process. I’m not even sure where they’re shooting, but I would love to partner with them as well on that. I think we’ll just see how things line up. 

BD: I will cross my fingers because Season 2 looks fantastic. I have one more question. If you could work on anything in the world, what would your dream project be? 

You know that’s an interesting one. I mean I was a heavy science fiction reader. I don’t know if they actually did, but there were discussions of doing the Dragonriders of Pern books by Ann McCaffrey. That kind of world building would be very interesting. In the course of my career I’ve worked in so many different genres and everything else that I would say there’s not necessarily anything out there at this point in time that I feel I absolutely would have to work at before I ended up transitioning out of the business so to speak. 

BD: That’s a great position to be in!