Incorporating fan art and cutting-edge technology, the Disney+ series creates breathtaking virtual environments.
Walker Scobell in ‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians’
Disney/David Bukach
[This story contains spoilers for the third episode of Percy Jackson and the Olympians on Disney+.]
After being claimed as the son of Poseidon at the end of Percy Jackson and the Olympians‘ second episode, Percy (Walker Scobell) begins his quest to return the Master Bolt to Olympus. He, Grover (Aryan Simhadri) and Annabeth (Leah Sava Jeffries) hit the road, ending up at, as the episode title (and corresponding chapter of The Lightning Thief) notes, the “Garden Gnome Emporium” of Medusa (Jessica Parker Kennedy).
Except, as will be the case with most of the locations the trio visits on their quest, the actors didn’t actually venture out across the country — instead, they worked mostly within a StageCraft set in British Columbia, with the ILM-designed space providing virtual locations for both Camp Half-Blood and the places Percy, Annabeth and Grover will visit later in the season. The technology — also used on The Mandalorian, House of the Dragon and other productions — allows the actors, director and cinematographer to see the virtual environment around them and creates a more immersive on-set world than working against a blue- or green-screen backdrop.
“The moment your brain takes you there, you’re inside that world. It’s real,” production designer Dan Hennah — an Oscar winner for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — told The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”
The Percy Jackson and the Olympians books contain a good amount of description of places and objects, but they’re not illustrated. VFX supervisor Erik Henry turned to a number of different sources for inspiration — including fan-created art of the camp.
“That was definitely an area I went online and saw what people liked, and I borrowed from that, let’s say,” Henry said. “I hope that people will like what we did.”
Henry also said the long panning shot when Chiron (Glynn Turman) is showing Percy around the camp was a collaboration between his and Hennah’s teams. “Dan had an idea of what that should be, and we put in all of what Dan wanted,” Henry said. “Because it was this big pan, we started to scratch our heads and say, ‘Well, maybe we should add a little bit more.’”
The waterfall and volcano in the background were among the additions, as were glimpses of a paddock for flying horses kept at the camp — an allusion to the second book in the series,
