Christopher Lloyd’s Disembodied Head Comes to Life in This ‘Wednesday’ VFX Reel

Living, talking, disembodied heads in jars bring the perfect amount of ghoulish mirth to any given project—just ask Futurama. But rarely has the idea been executed with more advanced skill than in season two of Wednesday. In a new behind-the-scenes video, the VFX whizzes at Scanline VFX and Eyeline Studios walk us through the creation of Professor Orloff, a character that comes to vivid life thanks to actor Christopher Lloyd and some very cutting-edge technology.

Casting Lloyd—who played Uncle Fester in 1991’s The Addams Family and 1993’s Addams Family Values—offers a clever nod to his long-standing ties with the franchise, and you can see in the video how game he was to record his performance as Professor Orloff in such an unconventional way.

As Scanline VFX’s Derek Spears explains, Wednesday VFX supervisor Tom Turnbull was impressed with the studio’s disembodied-head work on Netflix’s One Piece. From there, Eyeline Studios’ “volumetric capture technology” became an integral part of the process, according to Eyeline’s Nhat Phong Tran.

The technology, which uses many cameras in a unique setup, was able to record Lloyd’s performance from all different angles while also showing him the already-shot scene he was a part of. That way, he could properly calibrate his reactions and know just where to direct his gaze. Then, Wednesday creators used lighting and further special effects (like all those water bubbles) to situate Professor Orloff in Burton’s world alongside Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday and her classmates, even if he never actually went to the set or interacted with any other actors.

Watch the video and marvel at how they pulled it off, making Orloff feel like a seamlessly integrated, realistically (if fantastically) rendered character rather than just a special effect.

Wednesday season two is now streaming on Netflix.

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