Superman

When it came to bringing a newly imagined DC universe to life, director James Gunn and Production VFX Supervisor Stéphane Ceretti renewed their trusted creative partnership with Framestore. Building on a collaboration that delivered fan-favourite characters and worlds for the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, the team was tasked with creating some of Superman's most ambitious and technically challenging sequences. The work, which spanned Framestore's Montreal and Mumbai studios, included two of the film's main assets—the iconic Fortress of Solitude and the beloved Krypto the Superdog—as well as the look of the Engineer’s nanite power, pioneering a new technique for Superman’s parents hologram, and choreographing complex superhuman fights. 

“It was a huge show, a tight schedule, and a lot of complexity. But what really stood out was the collaboration, with James, with Stéphane, and across our teams in Montreal and Mumbai. It’s the kind of creative partnership you always hope for.” Stéphane Nazé, VFX Supervisor.

Bringing Superman’s canine companion to the big screen in live-action for the first time was a responsibility the team didn't take lightly. The goal was to create a performance that was both emotionally resonant and photoreal, avoiding any hint of cartoonishness. The animation team, led by Loïc Mireault, began by studying footage of James Gunn’s own dog, Ozu, who served as the real-world inspiration for Krypto.

"James provided us close to 1 hour of Ozu footage in a lot of different contexts which was really useful to help us capture the essence of Ozu’s behavior and personality," says Animation Supervisor, Loïc Mireault. "Starting with that as a strong base, we could mimic Ozu’s facial gestures and behavior or to match things like his specific asymmetric ears!" This dedication to a real-world anchor was crucial. While Krypto was crafted to feel muscular and powerful, the team’s guiding principle was that he should behave not as a "smarter" dog, but as a normal dog that just happens to have superpowers. This approach ensures that even with his amazing abilities, the audience connects with an expressive and believable character who is, first and foremost, a dog (and not so often a good boy).

For Krypto, the most subtle yet significant challenge was a technical one: rendering white fur against a white, snowy environment. "It's really hard to establish what could be the right value of white," explains VFX Supervisor Stéphane Nazé. "Because white is such a distinctive color, it can really look uncanny and CG-ed if not created properly. We spent weeks chasing the right shade in every lighting context." According to CG Supervisor Kevin Sears, this required "balancing white fur against snow," a meticulous process of placing Krypto’s asset into numerous lighting contexts and making minute adjustments that yielded a huge visual difference and adds, "Our talented groom and lookdev artists worked for over 16 months to perfect the style and look of Krypto using our proprietary HairFilters and shading".

Framestore was tasked with creating one of cinema’s most iconic and otherworldly locations: the Fortress of Solitude. Designed as a fully CG environment, the team built the vast crystalline structure from the towering exterior to the cavernous, light-drenched interior. The Fortress may be made of crystal, but it’s far from static and required a blend of artistic design and technical ingenuity.

The crystalline look was developed in close collaboration with the visual development team, led by Sylvain Lorgeou, Head of Visual Development. Through practical lighting studies and extensive render tests, the team honed a style that balanced realism with myth. “The challenge was finding a visual identity that was both scientifically grounded and cinematically iconic. It had to feel beautiful, but haunted. Reflective, but readable. It’s not just a set — it’s a character.”

Pushing Framestore’s environment and rendering pipeline to new heights, the team designed the Fortress using more than 6000 reflective crystals, each one a challenge in shading, lighting, and rendering. The team started by building a digital kit of 54 different crystal types, some as large as the Empire State Building. CG Supervisor Kevin Sears explains the immense undertaking: “We carefully arranged the crystals to match the silhouette from the concepts and then filled in the rest, for a total of over 6,000. For crystals that came close to the camera, we had FX procedurally generate the shattered interior cracks to give complex refractions. All 16 months on the show were spent optimizing these crystal renders—at 4K resolution, some shots seen in the trailer took around 7 days per frame on our highest-spec machines.”

This sheer number of crystals posed a massive rendering challenge that required an innovative workflow. "To manage the immense rendering complexity’, ‘we developed a two-pass technique using our proprietary renderer, Freak. We essentially 'baked' the complex internal refractions of the crystals into one pass and then rendered the outer reflections in a second.’ explains Sears. “This gave us greater artistic control and improved sampling efficiency in the final image. It’s a technique we also used to bring the Emerald City to life in Wicked.”

The Engineer presented a complex character-based FX challenge: creating a suit that was not just armor, but a sentient, living weapon. The creative brief from James Gunn was to convey the character's dangerous capabilities, with her nanite-based power escalating with her aggression. Drawing inspiration from concept arts from the production, references of metal filings shifting with magnetism, and Framestore's own experience growing Groot’s arms for Guardians of the Galaxy, the VisDev team created numerous animations and concepts to define the look. They established a core principle: the effect needed to be a subtle yet menacing wave of energy, not a chaotic "swarm of bees", making the power feel integrated and intelligent.

This philosophy was key. As Kevin Sears explains, “Treating the costume as a living part of her own body was key to blending all the parts together for her fantastical superpowers!”

This principle guided a sophisticated, layered workflow. The nanites would pulse and grow larger as she became more aggressive, a process that required a seamless blend of digital artistry and technical precision. "After the digi double of The Engineer was completed," Sears notes, "we knew this character would need to peel and transform any part of her body in FX. We had the team use Houdini to build a cubed version of the suit that we could create new inside geometries while keeping the textures applied." After animation, a Creature FX pass simulated natural wrinkles in the skin-tight suit. This realistic base was then used to wrap the final nanite geometry across the surface, creating a result that is "not too flashy but is sophisticated and understandable."

The film marks the first-time integration of 4D Gaussian Splatting in a feature film. These holographic visuals utilized a new workflow,  developed in close collaboration with Infinite Realities, to create the recordings of Superman's Kryptonian parents seen within the Fortress.

Unlike traditional methods that rely on CG characters or pre-planned camera moves with actors on stage, this new technique uses machine learning to capture an actor’s live performance from nearly 200 cameras at once. This captures not just an image, but all the light energy and data from every angle, generating a high-precision, moving 3D volumetric point cloud of the actor that looks like living photography.

This gave the filmmakers unprecedented creative freedom in post-production. "Instead of pre-planning motion control with moving cameras that can be sensitive to misalignment and flexibility, we can now re-film their performance in post with any context the director would like," states Sears. 

This freedom was crucial for a key story beat. "For the story point of Superman’s Kryptonian parents to have an unstable recorded message, we could slice sections of each actor and animate them to rotate and turn away from the camera while still keeping all the photographic details of their appearance," Sears explains. The ability to make the holograms glitch and break apart in true 3D space is an effect that couldn't be achieved with traditional compositing alone.’

'Superman with Framestore – Krypto, crystals, & cutting-edge gaussian splats' - FX Guide

'Superman: Weta FX & Framestore create more than 1,000 VFX' - Post Magazine

'Le studio Framestore, artisan du nouveau film Superman' - Radio Canada

Superman: Stéphane Nazé (VFX Supervisor), Loïc Mireault (Animation Supervisor) & Kevin Sears (CG Supervisor) - The Art of VFX

Gaussian Splatting in Superman - Radiance Fields