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Doing the Locomotion VFX supervisor Geoff Scott leads us on a tour of the visual highlights of the second season of Snowpiercer. By Trevor Hogg
T
he political and social implications of the class structure as well as the impact of global warming are the prevailing themes in the post-apocalyptic French graphic novel Le Transperceneige (Snowpiercer) by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette. The events of the book, Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 English-language feature adaptation and the TNT/Netflix series version (which debuted in 2020) take place onboard a high-speed train consisting of 1,001 cars and 3,000 passengers representing the remains of humanity travelling through a frozen world. The VFX team working on the second season of the series were tasked with exploring more of the wintry landscape of the project, leading to the number of visual effects shots being doubled to 2,400. “In the first season, we were cautious and used our exterior train shots mostly for establishers,” explains production VFX supervisor Geoff Scott (Wynonna Earp), who worked once again with exec producer Graeme Manson (Orphan Black). “Sometimes there would be a sto-
ry-driven event, like the avalanche in Episode 102. You would have the stuff happening underneath the train in Episode 106. And at the end of Episode 110, with Big Alice’s connector car. Aside from that, our story was more about the people inside the train. We’re doing a lot more with the outside in Season Two.” The lion’s share of the VFX centered on the window shots, which inadvertently enabled Scott to overcome a phobia. “At the end of Season One, I spent two days in a helicopter flying in and around the Rockies to get profiles of the mountains,” recalls Scott. “Years ago, on another show, I almost fell off a building, and since then I’ve been afraid of heights. Now, I’m good with heights again! We have a lot of plate elements. We basically had a rolling environment that we could render 270 degrees. We also took pieces of CG environments and handed them to our internal team to composite. These little chunks were rendered at 8K and popped into the windows as a soft-focus-backgrounds. We would build environ-
ments specific to the shots and set up specific cameras.”
No Denying Climate Change Throughout the series, viewers will discover that the Earth is going through yet another climate change. “There are subtle things that we are doing in the sequences,” states Scott. “You will notice that we’re having more snow in the atmosphere than in Season One.” The overlap in production between Seasons One and Two also enabled the team to make story continuity corrections. “We actually went back to Season One and removed 90 percent of the snow floating through the air so it felt more like snow that had been kicked up by Snowpiercer and Big Alice,” says Scott. “Because we had the luxury of still having those shots open in progress, we were able to quickly fix a problem that would have had people going, ‘I saw snow in Season One.’” A close-up shot of a snowflake serves as a visual transition. “Because more loose snow is
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