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Jon Steinberg and Dan Shotz’s reimagining of Rick Riordan’s best-selling book series, that tells the story of a 12-year-old with newfound divine powers and his journey to find a lightening bolt he’s accused of stealing, looked to ILM VFX supervisor Jeff White and the studio’s groundbreaking StageCraft LED Volume technology for live-action shoots integrating real-time animated environments. Led Digital Display Board
Centaurs, three-headed dogs, horned tigers, lightning-powered bipedal bulls, and more frightfully magnificent creatures make a breathtaking entrance in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Jon Steinberg and Dan Shotz’s reimagining of award-winning author Rick Riordan’s best-selling book series. The series’ first two episodes debuted on Disney+ yesterday, December 20; it’s the first episodic project based on Riordan’s books and marks the first time Steinberg and Shotz, known for TV series like Jerico and Black Sails, have worked with an LED Volume stage of this scale.
“We’d used the Volume on another show, just as a sort of test to see what it was we were about to embark on,” notes Shotz, referring to the extended reality technology that combines live-action performance on stage and real-time animated environments projected on LED panels. “But yes, essentially, what we did on Percy was a first for us both. Luckily, Disney really put the resources behind all this to make sure we had what we needed, and Industrial Light & Magic was there to guide us the whole way.”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians – from 20th Television and directed by James Bobin, Anders Engström and Jet Wilkinson – tells the epic story of a 12-year-old modern demigod, Percy Jackson (Walker Scobell), who's just coming to terms with his newfound divine powers when the sky god Zeus (Lance Reddick) accuses him of stealing his master lightning bolt. With help from his friends Grover (Aryan Simhadri) and Annabeth (Leah Jeffries), Percy must embark on an adventure of a lifetime to find the lightning bolt and restore order to Olympus to prevent an all-out war. Steinberg serves as co-creator, showrunner and executive producer alongside fellow EPs Shotz and the author himself, Riordan.
Riordan’s wife Rebecca Riordan is also executive producing.
“We have many huge fans of the Percy Jackson series at ILM,” Visual Effects Supervisor Jeff White says. “The story of Percy Jackson is a treasure trove of effects and creatures that ILM was very fortunate to get to create. To make the Minotaur, Chiron the Centaur, Medusa, Cerberus, Grover's legs, and Pegasus all on one show was such a unique opportunity. And knowing that Rick and his wife were going to be so deeply involved in the creative, was very exciting to us.”
Chris Columbus directed and produced Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief back in 2010, along with a second film, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters in 2013. Riordan’s book series also was made into a video game by Activision for Nintendo DS, as well as a musical from A Series of Unfortunate Events story editor Joe Tracz. However, 20th Television’s series features Riordan and his wife in a much more influential role than any of the previous reimaginings.
“There wasn't a lot of time spent trying to figure out what to do differently than the movies,” shares Steinberg. “I think the movies were allowed to just be someone else's project that existed in a different context. The process of imagining this series was intentionally targeted toward the words on the page from Rick's book, and trying to imagine those things in the most engaging, fun, believably grounded way possible, and then trying to surround the production with the kind of people it takes to do that kind of work, which is not easy.”
People like those at ILM.
“It really helped to hire one of the best houses in the world to deliver on that vision,” says Shotz. “You can say this a lot about filmmaking, but it is about who your collaborators are, and finding some of the best people in the world to bring this to life. Everybody felt a lot of responsibility. Even the heads of ILM, who delivered on this, they have kids who are 13 and 14-years-old and their kids were looking at them saying, ‘You got to give us the Percy Jackson we’ve always imagined.’”
White added, “There was also the challenge of how to execute a show where the main characters needed to travel from New York to Los Angeles while all being shot in Vancouver BC and it had to feel authentic. This was a perfect application of the StageCraft LED technology that ILM had been developing for almost a decade.”
In addition to bringing to CG animation some of Greek mythology’s most impressive wild beasts, the Percy Jackson team also utilized ILM’s world-famous skills to create environments that, up until a few years ago, could only be imagined by the actors until the film was in post-production. The extra-large LED Volume “StageCraft” was custom-built for the production by ILM.
“Forget about how old our actors are,” notes Steinberg of the series’ young lead cast. “Asking any actor to imagine they're standing in Hades’ throne room in the underworld and then give a performance is a lot. I mean, you can do it. But that doesn't mean that it's easy to do. To put these young actors in the Volume environment and let them feel like they're there, it takes away a lot of the big drawbacks of trying to create these kinds of environments in bluescreen. With the Volume, everybody knows exactly what you're feeling and what you're looking at. Everyone’s in that space with you, and I think it changes the way performance comes through. And the way a scene feels.”
ILM created 29 different environments for the show that played on the StageCraft Volume, some infinitely more complicated than others.
“When it came to executing the Tunnel of Love, we didn't want the actors to have to just stare at a bluescreen,” explains White. “To tell the story of Hephestus, we partnered with Tonic DNA, who created the 2D animation that plays out on the tunnel wall. We then built a 60-foot-wide water tank inside of the Volume stage where the boat was static in the middle and all the movement was done by sliding the tunnel environment on the StageCraft walls. The actors were able to watch and respond to the story all around them. What was incredible about the technique was that it allowed us to find new camera angles that I don't believe we would have found if we were just shooting on bluescreen. It was a great collaboration between production design, cinematography, visual effects, and special effects to pull off that effect.”
One of the best sequences, in White’s opinion, was a forest environment with unique interactive lighting in which a confrontation between the main characters is reflective in the world around them.
“We were able to work with the director Jet Wilkinson to design a lighting effect in the forest which all played as live triggers on the wall,” explains White. “She was able to annotate in the script exactly what color and size of effect should happen on each line of dialog. Not only did this make it easier for the editorial team to cut with consistent lighting queues, but we were able to interactively support changes in the characters with the action on the ILM StageCraft volume, which was such an exciting process and collaboration between many departments.”
The LED stage provided additional benefits besides allowing the actors to visualize and perform in environments they’ve never seen. In fact, one aspect of the project that drew in ILM was the chance to work on environments that most audience members would know and had even visited in person, and somehow convince them that what they were looking at wasn’t on a stage.
“The stuff that's most impressive is the stuff that's most invisible,” says Steinberg. “To create fantasy environments is one thing. You have nothing to compare it to. But to recreate an environment that you've been in and to make it so that you can't tell that it isn't the same is a much taller order. The work that the ILM team and our visual effects team did to create the Statue Room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art… you might not know that it’s on a Volume stage. And that's what's so amazing, to create a space that becomes completely invisibly virtual. It’s a wildly useful tool.”
Shotz adds, “ILM has obviously done this for very big Star Wars shows, where they're building and creating these new worlds and planets. What they were so excited about for this show was a lot of the Volume environments needed to look like real, grounded places that everybody's been to. It was a new challenge for them but also a chance to explore what was possible with this tech.”
Both Steinberg and Shotz admit that the learning curve with the Volume was steep and immediate and that the downfalls of such technology would have been much more prominent had they not had Volume veterans to show them the way.
“You have to be careful,” says Shotz. “This tech does some wonderful things really well. And there are some things you want to watch out for. But, because we were working with ILM, and it was their StageCraft that they’ve had such good experience with on Star Wars, they were able to guide us through this process. It's a big learning curve with this tech. But when it works, it's incredible.”
Percy Jackson and the Olympians’ first season consists of eight episodes and Disney+ will be releasing one new episode weekly. Riordan’s seventh Percy Jackson book, Wrath of the Triple Goddess, is also set to release in 2024.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
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