Making Dean Look Younger: Back in early season 10, the VFX crew de-aged Dean to create a flashback scene. They began by searching out younger photos of Jensen Ackles. They also had to remove the beard/scruff that present-day Jensen was wearing while filming the flashback scene. Present-day Dean needed to have a scruff for continuity for scenes the next day, so they couldn’t shave it off for the flashback. “So we had to erase the bead [sic]. We’ve done a skin fix on him, we’ve taken out all of his character lines – actors don’t get wrinkles, they get character lines – and we increased the size of his eyes by 2%. That was the route that we went in order to accomplish what he looks like 10 or 12 years ago.”
Demon Smoke: According to [VFX Supervisor Mark] Meloche, the demon smoke on SUPERNATURAL has “gone through three iterations. The first you’ll all recall from season 1, [which] was very minimal and that was the best they could do [at the time and was done by an external company]. Then once we got our hands on it [in house in season 2] we created a new smoke that could turn and weave a little bit, but it wasn’t that controllable. As of about three years ago we designed this new smoke rig [and] we can make this thing dance. It can do tight turns.” The photo [above] is from the season 3 episode “Jus in Bello”, which would have been the second iteration.
Merging Charlie: “Instead of creating a model of Charlie [in the season 10 episode ‘There’s No Place Like Home’], we used something called photogrammetry, where she was in costume laying down. I photographed her from multiple angles [and took] probably over 100 photos. That’s fed into a separate piece of software that actually creates the model of her” and allows them to air scenes like the [above]. They’re going to be utilizing this technique in an upcoming episode as well and Meloche says those are small techniques that move things along quicker.
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