Interview: Discussing the Incredible Visual Effects of ‘3 Body Problem’ with VFX Supervisor Stefen Fangmeier and VFX Producer Steve Kullback

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem is based on one of the most ambitious sci-fi franchises, Liu Cixin‘s Remembrance of the Earth’s Past trilogy, and it’s perhaps even more ambitious to adapt for the screen on a technical level than David Benioff and D.B. Weiss‘ previous television series, Game of Thrones.

In stepping into the world of the show and crafting its visual effects, VFX Producer Steve Kullback tells Awards Radar on Zoom that it didn’t feel as daunting to work on the series as it did with Game of Thrones because he went through the series alongside VFX Supervisor Stefen Fangmeier:

“The last two seasons of Game of Thrones were completely overwhelming on every level. I returned from that feeling like anything after this would be a piece of cake. Of course, this is no piece of cake, and there was a lot of work to it. But it’s also similar to Game of Thrones. It starts with a slow burn and then a batch of cool, eye-popping stuff. Obviously, the Judgment Day scene was massive, just like the game, launching satellites into space, CG monkeys, and a struggle session at Tsinghua University where we don’t have the crowd or the environment. But having gotten a first glance at the season two outline, which I can’t tell you much about, it’s like Game of Thrones. It just explodes in every direction from here on out. And that seems a bit daunting.”

One of the most ambitious worlds of the show is the San-Ti video game, which Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and Jack Rooney (John Bradley) step into in the first three episodes of the series, which requires lots of animation and interactive lighting as the two actors are mostly working on a blue screen soundstage, as explained by Fangmeier:

“What was unusual regarding the game was that the photography had to take place on the stages with the actors, but the whole thing is about multiple suns orbiting the planet, and the characters are inside a system with three suns. There was a lot of fast, light animation at one end of the stage, where a small sun would set and another suddenly rose on the other. Interactive light had to play out on the actors.

We had many discussions with the Director of Photography of the first two episodes, Jonathan Freeman, about how to achieve that. We came up with the idea of using LED panels as light sources, which surrounded the stage in 180 degrees of LED panels where light sources could be programmed. Sometimes, we use them for the blue screens as they walk along if you remember the moments with The Follower [Eve Ridley] and Jin. We wanted to key those moments against the blue screen. That was programmed to move behind them while the rest of the wall was being used for lighting. Initially, it was a bit of a head-scratcher, but it turned out pretty well.

You can also see the light moving on the actors and the set when we go forward in time because the LED panels opposite them on the stage wall are highly animated, with light going through them. Of course, we replaced that with the appropriate timing key so it matched the skies and everything happening around them. The animation of light was a key factor, and the game itself was probably the most unusual aspect until you get to the zero gravity sequences or the melting of the Gothic cathedral and the lava field that remains. However, initially, it’s a fairly clean environment, and it’s mostly about the moving light. Of course, the storm was also coming in because the sun disappeared so quickly that suddenly, the planet became very cold in this snowstorm, and that’s where you have the naked people running for shelter.”

In our audio conversation, seen below, we also expanded on the game’s world while discussing episode three’s trisolar syzygy, one of the series’s most technically impressive scenes. Kullback and Fangmeier also broke down the process of working on the show’s most ambitious scene, the Judgment Day boat attack sequence, in episode five. Be warned, however, that this conversation contains spoilers for these specific moments of 3 Body Problem.

You can listen to my full interview with Stefen and Steve below and stream all episodes of 3 Body Problem on Netflix today:

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