VFX Supervisor Marshall Krasser Reveals Behind-the-Scenes Visual Effects Secrets from Season 2 of ‘Yellowjackets’

Awards Daily learns all the wilderness secrets (well. . . some of them!) from Yellowjackets Season 2 in an interview with VFX supervisor Marshall Krasser.

One of the tricks to top-notch special effects is the audience not knowing they’re watching something with digital enhancements. Showtime’s Yellowjackets excels at this magic trick, as its VFX team, including VFX supervisor Marshall Krasser, sells that the characters are freezing their butts off without actually putting the actors in zero-degree temperatures.

“Believe it or not, we had to add a lot of breath as they’re talking,” says Krasser. “That’s one of the things people don’t think about, especially on the sound stage is where you’d need it. If you didn’t have it, you might notice it, but with it there, it just sells that you’re outdoors.”

I learned a lot of fun, behind-the-scenes details from Krasser, including how they made Jackie look good enough to eat and got that amazing final shot of the cabin on fire.

The Visual Effects team had to remove elements of “humanity” in the wilderness, like ski slopes. 

Just as Season 2 expands on the darkness of the wilderness, the wilderness itself also expands its ecosystem. Kent O’Connor, the studio side visual effects supervisor, was a go-to guy for the VFX team and shot a lot of drone footage to set the scope for Krasser.

“We added the fallen snow,” says Krasser. “We also had to fade out some ski runs that were in the background. I think they shot some stuff around Whistler [Blackcomb]. Occasionally, you’d see some evidence of humanity, whether it be some logging cuts or ski slopes or a row here and there to get rid of. The other thing is that the cabin itself was on a sound stage, so they had some partial tree set dressing around it. We had to add the forest behind it, so they had a blue screen there, and we replaced that with forest to extend it back. In some of the scenes, when they’re snowed in, we put drifts up to drift over the cabin to enclose it. We were just basically augmenting the plane of photography at this point.”

Jackie didn’t look as delicious at first—that’s special effects!

The practical effects and makeup team dressed up a dummy Jackie, but the Yellowjackets executive producers and showrunners needed the VFX team to make it look. . .delicious?

“On set, sometimes things look really good, but you get in camera with the lighting, and it just didn’t have any mouth-watering juicy appeal. If you look at that scene, they wake up from their sense of smell. Of course, when they walk out, they’re so hungry already. Basically, for reference, we wanted something that looked really juicy. The first thing we looked at was Thanksgiving turkeys. What we ended up settling on was roasted pig on a spit. They say human skin is a lot like pig skin, so we looked and referenced golden roasted, juicy pig skin to basically augment what was there. We didn’t replace it; we just did augmentation to take it to the next level.”

Jackie ended up involved in a lot of special effects this season, including her infamous ear that Shauna ends up eating.

“The Jackie ear, when that falls off and you see the ear is gone, that was a really tricky shot. Her ear was actually there. They tried to tape it down, but it was bothering the actress, so they removed the tape. So we basically had to get rid of the ear, and then we had to put the partial ear back into that area so that it would sell the idea that the piece had broken off.”

“The Shit Cliff,” also the home of Crystal’s ill-fated demise, needed a lot of attention. 

“The cliff extension and the environment out there were shot against a blue screen. There were some trees and snow dressing in front, but basically the distance and mountains and stuff like that, we added additional snow. When you look down at the cliff, they had shot from above down on the actress, and it was just too close, so we had to scale it down and basically make more of the cliff. The side view, when she throws the shit bucket over, they were just a little teeny element that we could use and everything else was a digital matte painting. If you were to look at that [without effects], there’s a guy standing over here with a snowblower, there’s a fan here blowing stuff. It’s all the stuff you look at and think, how are you going to get rid of all that? It’s just that little section, and we create the rest of the world with it.”

That white moose and the moose tracks are not real; plus, Krasser has a remote cabin himself!

“Our sister company, FOLKS FX, did the moose aspect of that. That was more up their alley, so that was broken off to them. For the tracking part of it, they had tried to make moose prints on set, but trying to make moose prints in fake snow is a little difficult.”

Krasser had to figure out the right references and used his own off-grid remote cabin in the wilderness to come up with the prints. Glad the darkness didn’t get to him out there!

“I was up there over the winter in the deep snow, and I have moose that walk through the property, so I basically went up the forest road looking until I found some moose prints and photographed them as good references. It’s one thing about being in Canada; it’s pretty easy to run out and get moose [prints] and take photos of snow.”

How did they set a cabin on fire in the wilderness? 

Krasser says they brought in visual effects supervisor Richard Greenwood and his team to work on the finale, “Storytelling.” The Yellowjackets crew actually set the cabin on fire safely, but they needed the actors to be placed closer to the fire in the edit.

“So we recreated that whole little area, where the cabin was and all the extra trees we needed, and built that little environment. The plan was we would do the whole thing, so we could do the pullback and just build one asset. When they were shooting the cabin pullback, Kent [O’Connor] went out with his drone in the wilderness of British Columbia, and he was able to mimic the pullback on that. He shot a few takes, and we found one that worked perfectly. He pulled back, came up, and we opened up to see all the mountains. We didn’t have to do much augmentation in the world. The pullback with all the trees, those were 3D trees with snow on them.”

Yellowjackets is available on the Showtime app.