Created by Jonathan E. Steinberg (Black Sails, The Old Man) and author Rick Riordan (The Lost Hero, The Sun and the Star), the television series Percy Jackson and The Olympians is currently airing on Disney+ with new episodes released each week. The first two episodes debuted on December 19th, and the most recent episode premiered on December 26th. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the use of VFX was heavily used in the set designs for the series.
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, much of the filming takes place in a set created by the ILM, which is a visual effects company named Industrial Light & Magic. The ILM employs technology to create virtual and immersive surroundings, such as by using a large StageCraft LED screen that images can be displayed on instead of a solid color backdrop.
Dan Hennah (King Kong, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), who is a production designer for the series, stated to The Hollywood Reporter, “The moment your brain takes you there, you’re inside that world. It’s real. The foreground has [built] elements you can touch, and the background has elements you can see, and they work together in harmony. You’re stepping into your own illusion, which is very cool.”
Erik Henry (Black Sails, The Core), who is the VFX supervisor, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how art created by fans was helpful when deciding what to include in the virtual sets. He explained, “That was definitely an area I went online and saw what people liked, and I borrowed from that, let’s say. I hope that people will like what we did.”
In an episode, Percy Jackson, played by Walker Scobell (The Adam Project, Secret Headquarters) is shown around Camp Half-Blood by Chiron, played by Glynn Turman (Cooley High, Rustin). According to The Hollywood Reporter, in this scene, the entire camp is shown in a pan shot, and so both Henry’s team and Hennah’s team worked together to ensure the camp’s design was perfect.
Henry explained, “Dan had an idea of what that should be, and we put in all of what Dan wanted. Because it was this big pan, we started to scratch our heads and say, ‘Well, maybe we should add a little bit more.'”
Additionally, Jeff White (The Avengers, Aquaman), who is the VFX supervisor for ILM, stated to The Hollywood Reporter, “We had to do a lot of design work for what is magic in this world, like when Annabeth puts her hat on and disappears. What does the Master Bolt look like? Across all those challenges, you want each of them to be unique. You want each of them to be something that people have never seen before, but also faithful to the book. That’s a big design undertaking.”
Despite the use of VFX, there were elements of the set design that needed visual effects as well as more traditional set design methods.
Hennah explained to The Hollywood Reporter, “One of the things we did in the underworld was a forest, but it needed to be bigger than the Volume, which is 70 feet in diameter. We built this forest, which is about 150 feet in diameter, and we painted a backdrop. So we went the earliest form of background to the most modern, all in the same series.”