The Fantastic Four: First Steps

When Earth is visited by the Silver Surfer, who proclaims it the next target of Galactus, the Fantastic Four rise to the challenge and begin a journey into space to try and change the fate of their home planet. Upon finding Galactus, the Fantastic Four realise the full extent of the threat he poses, as they witness him destroy and devour a planet.

Visual Effects Supervisor Robert Allman led teams across London and Mumbai to create Galactus’s deep space devastation, exploring how to simulate the destruction of a planet, seen from just beyond its orbit. 

“When we found out we’d be working on the sequence involving the Galactic devourer, we were over the moon which is quite fitting, considering the whole thing was about destroying one,” comments FX Supervisor Jimmy Leung. “As always, we started with our VisDev team, who illustrated a range of concept designs for the client to choose from. After several rounds of creative revisions and storytelling considerations, we arrived at a balanced concept that everyone was excited about.” Global Head of Visual Development Owen Jackson, collaborated with VFX Supervisor Rob Allman on the design of the planet destruction, and other science-based effects seen in the film. Using a combination of motion Visdev and 2D Visdev concepts, the Visual Development team established a foundation for the different space effects and how they impact the Fantastic Four on their mission. Once the look had been established, the FX team began work on the final shots. 

Using SideFX’s Houdini, they built a custom setup to precisely control how each object broke apart depending on different impact points and levels of destruction. “We used USD to keep things organised and manageable across the pipeline—because when you're dealing with thousands of shards flying through space, you really don’t want to lose track of a single asteroid chip,” says Leung. 

The final step was rendering, completed by Framestore’s in-house rendering tool, Freak. “It handled the heavy lifting beautifully, even with all the debris, lighting complexity, and general cosmic mayhem we threw at it,” adds Leung. The end result was a carefully crafted transformation from planet into fragments in a way that showed the full-scale destruction and terrifying force of Galactus.

There are a number of sequences in the film where the Fantastic Four move through hyperspace in pursuit of, or away from, Galactus. Traditionally defined as a faster-than-light method of interstellar travel, hyperspace is a purely science fiction phenomenon, which left a lot of room for its creative and visual development in the film. 

After beginning his research into Alcubierre drives (a speculative warp drive concept) Compositor Jay Murray found the solution to interstellar travel in an unusual place - sparking an idea from his love of mixing cocktails. “Seeing a wormhole diagram made me think about a Martini glass and what it might look like to travel through the stem. So I grabbed a glass, took out my phone and started experimenting, looking through a bunch of different types of glasses at space themed imagery on my TV.” 

Jay’s photographs travelled to the FX department, where they were modelled and recreated in CG, some polishing in Compositing from himself and VFX Supervisor Rob Allman cemented the foundation of the hyperspace look. “The idea is that our Fantastic Four ship is really static, with the space moving and rotating around them, rather than our ship jumping through space,” observes Allman.

Alongside the interstellar travel, the VFX teams also had to produce a convincing black hole. The FX team consulted with a scientific advisor (Dr. Clifford Johnson) to get an understanding of how black holes form. Utilising Framestore’s in-house rendering tool Freak, the teams were able to accurately simulate the phenomenon. This allowed the artists to capture its gravitational effects, lighting, and more in the render itself. It was then integrated into the VFX pipeline, allowing artists to incorporate characters and environments into the image. “Freak did an incredible job at ray tracing for our neutron star,” says Allman. “When we prototyped Kip Thorne's gravitational lensing algorithms in Mantra, we had to do a lot of grading in comp to get the look. Once the algorithm was implemented for Freak, there was much less grading to do. Freak's beautiful ray tracing was on another level."

In an audience with Galactus, the Fantastic Four are offered a trade - if Sue Storm and Reed Richards (played by Vanessa Kirby and Pedro Pascal) give him their child to raise in his own image, he will leave Earth untouched. Storm and Richards refuse, and the Fantastic Four make a hasty exit in their ship Excelsior, pursued by the Silver Surfer. Storm goes into labour on the ship and delivers the baby while the Excelsior hurtles through hyperspace, challenging the teams with a zero-gravity birth sequence.

“That narrative was more about the chaos and drama of the birth and in that, Matt (Shakman, the Director) was sure from the start that Sue's hair should float free, giving her a wilder look,” explains Allman. Having watched reference footage of hair movement from astronauts on the International Space Station, the visual effects studio decided to take a different approach to keep the feeling of the moment. “The real world reference can be quite comical, the way hair behaves in zero gravity,” continues Allman. “We didn’t want it to be distracting for the audience, we had to strike a balance between wild floating strands and keeping it visually pleasing so it doesn’t take you out of the scene.”

This mindset carried through to the birth itself, where the primary focus was on the emotion of the moment. “The truth of the birth experience was confined to the surface look of Franklin, and even here we were sparing with substances like vernix and blood,” summarises Allman. “As with any art, we make choices about what is shown to better convey the narrative of the subject.”

Framestore’s rich history of character animation prepared the teams for the unique task of animating The Thing, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. The Thing appears in sequences finished by multiple VFX studios, and so one of the main considerations was keeping his performance consistent across the different teams. “Marvel Studios ensured this by holding twice weekly calls with all teams working on The Thing, so that we could listen in on the feedback for each other’s shots. This really helped us understand what worked and created a very open and collaborative environment,” recalls Animation Supervisor Max Solomon. 

Moss-Bachrach delivered his performance in a motion capture suit with a facial capture rig. This provided the teams with an enormous data set to distill down in order to marry with the bulk and weight of The Thing. The complexity of the character design necessitated an intricate facial rig with three layers of controls. “We had the usual FACS (facial action coding system) expressions, but we also had cluster controls around the eyes and mouth which allowed us to exaggerate some expressions,” explains Solomon. “And then on top of that, we had individual controls for each rock so we could fix obvious intersections and create more nuanced expressions where appropriate.”

In contrast to Moss-Bachrach’s motion capture, Julia Garner’s Silver Surfer was completely keyframe animated. Solomon and the animation department studied reference of surfboarders and the posing in the comics to find a consistent logic for how the character should move. “We had witness camera reference of Julia Garner for the performance shots,” clarifies Solomon, “but ultimately we found that her expressions needed to be muted as her character’s reflective exterior has less movement and facial flexibility. We learned a lot from her performance, and in a way it was similar to The Thing in that we had to translate a performance onto other materials that did not permit human levels of expression.”

The reflective qualities of the Silver Surface posed a lighting conundrum for the team. “Our understanding of facial expression and indeed, the subtleties of the human form generally, are inescapably linked to the play of light and shadow across a body,” Allman explains. “In a reflective surface, a dark form is often the result of reflecting a dark object, rather than shadow, so the relationship between dark and light is confused.” The solution was to have enough blurry reflection in the areas where nuance was important, like the face, but not enough to read that it was a different shader. “The rest was then artists coming up with lights placed in such a way as to complement the performance,” Allman continues. “This was challenging, and lighting her character took much longer than the others in the film.”

The Fantastic Four: First Steps released globally from 25 July 2025.