Spoiler Alert: This story contains spoilers for Season 2 of Part 2 of “Wednesday” and is currently streaming on Netflix.
Christopher Lloyd is familiar with the strange world of the Adams family. The actor played Uncle Fester in both the 1991 film The Addams Family and its sequel, Addams Family Values. He returned to Netflix’s “Wednesday” as Professor Orloff, one of the longest serving teachers at Nevermore Academy.
But he is not a normal teacher. Professor Oloff is a severed head floating in a bottle.
Effects were achieved through volume capture technology. Visual Effects supervisor Tom Turnbull said, “Using volume capture, literally captures every frame of his performance to very high resolution, and then recreates it as a CG version using that data.”
The replica was the perfect image of the actor. Turnbull said, “He’s technically CG in the bottle, but Christopher Lloyd drives it.”
Typically, such effects are a combination of practical and computer-generated, but as Turnbull explains, “it’s not practical. Practical is a real actor.”
Hitting the right balance was key to making Lloyd look as realistic as possible, but when they saw the first effect it looked too realistic and “you don’t believe he’s underwater.” Turnbull navigated the challenge by “accepting glass distortions and water refraction.” He continues. “We added bubbles, bits of dirt and stuff that floated there, so it was untouched and searching for what we had finished.
Adam Rose/Netflix
Elsewhere in the series, Turnbull worked closely with prosthetic Tristan Baslus, especially for patients at Willow Hill. Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) discovers an ominous secret operation going on in the basement. After all, Judy Spannagel (Heather Matarazzo) has maintained the exile as a prisoner and tested them. When Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) tries to free them, they come across a variety of characters, including zombies and half-human/halfferrin characters. Some of them come out for just a few seconds, but Versluis spent hours on the details. For these characters, Tim Burton provided a very good reference to the team. “There were some pictures of monsters and makeup from his childhood. But they were our stepping stones for creating designs.”
One of the characters Versluis was particularly proud of was a creation inspired by the young prosthetic-led Frankenstein. He said, “The makeup itself is a three-hour process, with multiple pieces around the neck, over the head, and the chin. Each piece is glued and the edges are blended.” Versluis used scars, staples and twisted skin, as hair came out. He added teeth and contact lenses to make it all possible. Due to Burton’s production, small details were not spare. Versluis says, “It was weeks of preparation, sculpture, casting, pre-painting.”
