All about the VFX, costumes and sound design on The Wheel of Time

It takes a village to make a show as complicated as The Wheel of Time. Yes, the writers and actors and directors are important, but behind them are an army of special effects technicians, prop masters, costumers and sound engineers helping to bring Robert Jordan’s world to life. While we wait for The Wheel of Time season 2, let’s take a look at how everyone came together to create season 1, starting with the special effects wizards.

“As much as possible we tried to lean into the stuff that is fresh to television audiences,” showrunner Rafe Judkins told VFX Voice. “When the writers’ room was getting started, we hired a bunch of concept artists from around the world, coming from different backgrounds, genres and mediums to tackle some of the big elements of the show. What does channeling, Trollocs, Fades and the landscape of this broken world look like? Then working with our heads of departments and an internal concept team, we took those ideas and began to flesh them out into this world.”

Let’s start with the world, which was the responsibility of production designer Ordrej Nekvasil. “The first conversation that Rafe and I had in 2018 was about the cast and the concept of the world,” he said. “You have a village in the mountains with all of these different cultures influencing each other, which means that the style of the architecture is a mixture of everything that we know. I used elements from Asia, Europe, Africa and South America to create our own culture. The mountains look like the Alps, but the village is a mixture of European Alps plus a little bit of China and Malaysia.”

"[Emond’s Field] was in the middle of a pine tree forest, so it would be a wooden village that is situated on a lake, and we are also using clay and straw. Our mood boards were always a mixture of different styles and cultures….There is no black powder, which means that they don’t have shotguns. Everything is about swords, spears and arrows."

And the Two Rivers is only one of the areas the characters visited in the first season. They traveled far and wide, and the production team tried to as much of their travels as possible in reality, rather than have them work in front of a green screen.

“One thing that was important for me from the beginning was that this world feel authentic and real,” Judkins said. “Even for the actors and crew, trying to go to places and, as much as we can, put stuff in camera, even if we end up augmenting or enhancing it later with visual effects. There is a scene where two of our leads, Rand al’Thor [Josha Stradowski] and Egwene Al’Vere [Madeleine Madden], have a conversation sitting on a rock looking down at their home in this Alpine environment. We could have easily used a rock with some grass around it in Prague, but we actually took the actors to the top of a huge mountain pass in Slovenia. What we did was add in their home village of the Two Rivers and the two actual rivers at the bottom of the shot, but the rest of it is in camera.”

Even in otherworldly areas like the Blight, the team tried to keep things practical. “The most challenging set was the place called The Blight, which is described differently in the books,” said Nekvasil. “It’s a strange forest organism that is able to kill everything, and is supposed to look alive but is not alive. You need a lot of good sculptors to work with you to create the organic shape that you are looking for. If you have something more architectural, you can always do proper prints for the details. I hope that the audience will enjoy it.”

Channeling and Trollocs

But of course, computer-generated effects have to come in at some point, and indeed, the first season of The Wheel of Time has a hefty 3,500 VFX shots. For instance, digital doubles were used in big battle and crowd scenes. “In these types of shows, for safety reasons we do prop replacements. When you get an axe close frame, it’s not holding up,” said visual effects supervisor Julian Parry. “You can see it’s fiberglass and a blunt edge. We were doing a lot of classic weapon repair. Also, when it came to stabbings or other contact moments, we were having to use the 3D extensions.”

And then there are the moments when Aes Sedai use the One Power, which is obviously special effects. “Moiraine [Rosamund Pike] draws upon the One Power, an ethereal energy that surrounds the character,” Parry said. “It is called ‘channeling’ and is heavily written about by Robert Jordan, so we had quite a bit of source information. We designed that magic from the ground up because it needed to be called upon many times throughout the series. What you’re looking at is called the ‘Weave,’ which has five different layers [wind, spirit, earth, air and fire] to it. The research to understand the physics of it helped to inform the people around us while filming what exactly is going on.”

Although the weaves mostly look white, Judkins explained that there are different colors layered in there: “As different things are woven together, you get a slightly different color as well. We looked at closeups of cosmic particles, flames being brought up for the first time, and ink moving through oil. The elements of those that worked best were blended together to create the look of channeling.”

As for the fearsome Trollocs, a lot of that was done practically. “The choice was made early on to go with physical creatures in the room,” Parry said. “Our Makeup Effects Supervisor, Nick Dudman [Penny Dreadful], provided us with a seven-foot Trolloc, but we couldn’t have hundreds of them, which were needed for the show. We were lucky to have the hero Trolloc for eyelines and performance, and in post-production we would enhance those creatures.”

So again, it takes a village. And that village will be back and better than ever for season 2. “Amazon has given us the resources to bring something incredible to life, and people will be excited to see the Battle of Two Rivers for the first time,” Judkins said. “As we move into future seasons, we keep going to new worlds within the world of The Wheel of Time, so we are developing new cultures, characters, visual effects and creatures. But we now have this foundation of the first season to look at and see whether these new things are too different or different enough. It gives you a point of comparison from which to approach everything, which is a much easier process than that first ideation phase.”

Now on to another important part of the visuals on the show: