Interview: Visual Effects Supervisor Marcus Taormina Discusses ‘Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver’

Zack Snyder has a unique visual style, with incredibly painterly frames exacerbated by slow motion and dynamic camera movements. It’s instantly recognizable from the minute his films begin, and it’s no different in the Rebel Moon saga, including its latest installment, Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver.

His films are also incredibly specific in how their visual effects are designed, as explained by Visual Effects Supervisor Marcus Taormina, speaking with Awards Radar on Zoom during a virtual press day about the movie. The process is incredibly collaborative, with Snyder storyboarding out a sequence in advance and asking the visual effects team what they think is best for the creation of specific sequences during the post-production process: 

“When we start a movie, he’ll board out a sequence, and they will usually shoot what he storyboarded. As we develop the shots, there are a lot of back-and-forths, with me saying, “Ok, for this intention, you wanted a big explosion in the background.” I’ll show him a bunch of explosions, and for this movie, we actually got to shoot a bunch of explosions. 

Continuing to explore visuals in post-production is an important part of the process. But what’s great is that he also trusts me, lets me do my own thing, and comes out with some iteration of his thinking. That’s part of the whole filmmaking process. It’s a collaboration.

Zack has a certain composition that he wants, so I’m always looking at the storyboards and making sure that it feels visually like he intended if we execute a shot. He’s very good with storyboards and style frames, giving us a good target to hit.”

Both parts of Rebel Moon were shot back-to-back, in “almost chronological order,” which gave the visual effects department time to craft the visual effects for both movies simultaneously. In total, the entire process took over three years, with Taormina stating that “not a lot of people have the opportunity to work on two movies at the same time”:

“There was a point in which we couldn’t work on both anymore because Part One – A Child of Fire had to come out. But whatever we learned from the visuals we set up in movie one, we could bring it to movie two.

That was pretty unique because we had the opportunity to work on both at the same time versus having two separate films work on the two movies, which doesn’t feel the same visually when, for example, two years have passed, all the technology has changed, and other movies have come out. It was nice to make them feel visually very familiar, while, at the same time, Part One is very different from Part Two.”

For the visual effects team, Part Two had different challenges than Part One because it was entirely set in Veldt: 

“Most of it takes place either in Veldt or in the Dreadnought. It’s back-and-forth, back-and-forth, and back-and-forth. For example, you have the Nemesis [Bae Doona] story, the Noble [Ed Skrein] story, and the Gunnar [Michiel Huisman] story, where they are all in Veldt. To make that continually visually interesting and engaging for the audience, the most difficult part of this movie was to keep coming back to wherever you are in the parallel montage and keep it exciting. In the first movie, we do a montage where you get a new creature, the gang assembles, they go to another planet, and we explore a different world. That’s easier than keeping a parallel montage exciting in the second movie.”

Snyder loves slow-motion and has frequently explained in interviews that he loves to use it as a way to embellish some of the most heroic moments the characters go through in their personal journeys. In adapting visual effects for slow-motion, Taormina states that the process requires more time, but the key to good slow-motion is all about keeping the action alive: 

“For the battle sequences, we have to keep tracers alive in the frame and not have them across varying frames by which they play. One will cross left before it breaks the frame. You’re going to have another one starting to come in across. You have to keep it alive. That’s the biggest challenge with slow-motion, especially when there are big action scenes that take forever to collide. We did many rendering effects at the native frame rate and retimed them at varying rates to keep it different and interesting.”

Taormina is also busy at work on the director’s cuts of Rebel Moon Parts One and Two, which will be released on Netflix later this summer. While the visual effects supervisor couldn’t discuss anything regarding these versions, there was still plenty more to discuss during our audio conversation, as seen below. 

One of the most staggering sequences of the film occurs when Kora/Arthelais (Sofia Boutella) battles Atticus Noble on the King’s Gaze, which this writer watched a total of ten times before continuing the movie. Taormina broke it down, and what went into building such a moment may surprise you. We also discussed the process of crafting the Dreadnought and the film’s space sequences while also asking what some of his proudest moments as a visual effects supervisor were for this particular film.

Listen to my full interview with Marcus below and check out Rebel Moon: Part Two – The Scargiver on Netflix today:

[Some of the quotes in this article were edited for length and clarity]