Explore the origins of The Continent and some of its inhabitants with The Witcher: Blood Origin. Set 1200 years before the events of the Henry Cavill-led series, the story revolves around three downtrodden elves forced to team up on a quest in order to redeem themselves and put a stop to the impending downfall of the kingdom of Xin'trea.

The Witcher: Blood Origin features a large ensemble cast including Sophia Brown, Laurence O'Fuarain, Mirren Mack, Lenny Henry, Michelle Yeoh, Jacob Collins-Levy and Francesca Mills. Co-created by The Witcher showrunner Lauren S. Hissrich and series writer Declan de Barra, the miniseries explores not only the early years of the Continent, but also the infamous Conjunction of the Spheres and the introduction of monsters to the world.

Related: Witcher: Blood Origin’s Show Changes Gave It An Impossible Task

Screen Rant recently got the opportunity to speak exclusively with VFX Supervisor at Rodeo FX, Sébastien Francoeur, and Rodeo FX producer Graeme Marshall to discuss The Witcher: Blood Origin, introducing new monsters to the world, the Netflix franchise's future, and more.

Francoeur & Marshall on The Witcher: Blood Origin & The Franchise's Future

The Witcher Blood Origin Anglerfish monster

Screen Rant: I actually finally caught up on The Witcher: Blood Origin the other day once we got this scheduled. RodeoFX has a history of working on the mainline series, when did you both first hear about this expansion and when did they start talking with you about what they wanted from you for the show?

Graeme Marshall: I know that our executive producer and business development team had been heavily involved in the entire franchise with Dan Barrow and Sophie Jackson at Netflix for a long time. Even now we're talking about season 4 with them, and conversations are going on for season 4 and onward. So, we're very much creative colleagues. We work with them right from the onset, and we're trying to especially, like you say, being involved from season 2 onwards, trying to be more involved in the production side. They want to solidify the process and solidify the team on our side to get consistency. They're liking our work.

As far as learning about Lark, we kind of rolled right out of season 2 of the Witcher into The Lark, which was the working title. It was pretty much just business as usual for us, it's the same world, it's the same lore, it's the same sort of grittiness. It's been a lot of fun, I know that there was a little bit of ups and downs on their side early on in the process and we were just sort of there for them and we helped where we could and eventually, we got what you saw on your streaming service of choice.

What kind of conversations do you have with the writing team, or with the showrunners of, “Hey, I want to do this monster?” “Well, I don't know if we can,” or, “Yes, we can, but there may be this or that that needs to be done for it.”

Graeme Marshall: It's like consulting. I wouldn't say we're involved heavily in the writing as such, or in the creative side as such. It's more that they'll bounce ideas off us, say, “Hey, if we wanted to do this, then what would be involved?” Especially looking forward to future eps, there's been discussions about Sébastien being more of a consultant, even potentially on set for certain things to go and help with creature work, help with references, things like that. So, it's more of that sort of role as opposed to a direct creative input. It's definitely more of a consultancy, as far as process and things like that.

Did either of you actually get to be on the set for Blood Origin in that way?

Sébastien Francoeur: No, not for that project. I wasn't necessarily on set for Witcher Season 2, but I've been a part of seeing where the action will take place, understanding where the creature would be. I'm thinking about the Eskell Leshi, when he was fighting in the dungeon, so I had the chance to see that. But we were not involved so far at the onset, but future wise, it's ongoing in the discussion.

I can only imagine what kind of excitement that must be when you do finally get to go on set and meet these amazing people.

Graeme Marshall: For The Lark, I think it was still in the pandemic. I don't know how many waves we had, but it was in the waves of COVID, so travel was still kind of restricted and stuff like that. Even on this, on the production side, they were strict against non-essential personnel from going on set, because I know they had pretty heavy COVID protocols on their side as well.

Eile runs from Anglerfish monster

Coming into Blood Origin, we get to see the first monsters, so to speak, that are introduced to The Continent. What was it like to bring to life this new lore?

Graeme Marshall: Seb can talk more about the creature side of things, but I think what was really exciting from our side was being a part of visiting a different world. Because you haven't really done that in The Witcher, the audience might not get that at first, but once you actually sort of think about what happened it sort of becomes very clear that, “Well, hang on a second. We just traveled through, I don't know if it's dimensions necessarily, but that's super cool.” But as far as the creatures are concerned, Seb, we seem to design cool creatures.

Sébastien Francoeur: Yeah, they have a pretty strong creative team on their side, they start with a nice concept, close-up view and wide view. But, it's a 2D still, so those creatures are not moving, they cannot necessarily physically work the way they're drawn. So, we start there, that's a strong place to start with. Then we bring them to life, how that creature needs to chase, but actually it's a water creature, so we need to make sure that when it walks, it's not that comfortable, but can chase. Also, this is another thing that we need to develop internally is to keep in mind the physics of the creature, and how it can chase and be dangerous.

Graeme Marshall: Drawing from reality, I think.

Sébastien Francoeur: Yeah, and that's literally a sea creature that's on land that can barely walk, but it’s changed position. How did we call it internally? The shrimp.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, I think that was what it was called, like the land shrimp, or something like that.

Sébastien Francoeur: But this is an exercise we need to do on every creature that we're doing, and that's the exciting part.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, so I mean for this for instance, I think, Seb, we looked at Anglerfish for the glowing orbs and the feet and the bioluminescence and then we looked at, obviously, cucumber slugs, lobsters crabs, all that kind of stuff that kind of draws inspiration for how this ended up being.

Sébastien Francoeur: Also, the way the creature can live in a pond. I can't remember which one, but there's some creature that is literally in the bottom of the ocean. Go down like this and they rise up when they see something to eat, and then they attack like that. So that was the basic idea of that creature, how it can live in that pond and then we start from there. Then, we have that sluggish feeling that helps it swim, but also on Earth creates some kind of momentum with that. One thing also that was fun with that creature, we see those small flaps and it's meant to be underwater, so we make it a little bit weak, a little bit funny when it's out of the ocean, and we make that weak skin move.

Graeme Marshall: The other thing that the showrunners really were worried about was the creature getting too close to Éile. So, when we were in animation, they wanted us to make sure that it was like almost, I'm gonna use the word clumsy, but that's not quite what we wanted. They wanted it to be kind of awkward on land, so that we could sell the idea that it didn't get her, so that was one of the story points that they wanted us to hit with it.

Sébastien Francoeur: Yeah, at the end, we needed to ask ourselves if it gets her. It was all those story constraints that needed to be taken.

What would you say was one of the biggest challenges in helping to bring this creature to life?

Sébastien Francoeur: It's a little bit amphibian, and an amphibian creature that needs to look threatening, but a little bit clumsy. It's not that strong over the earth, so we make it believable that it can live in a pond. Also, the lure at the beginning of the shot is something that was quite interesting to build, because it needed to be beautiful, or at least something that we understand can motivate someone to go toward that. So, we needed to make all those ideas are in one atomic shrimp and just build all that. In that sense, in that world, we're not necessarily seeing all the qualities of the creature, but when we jump back into our world, the elves’ world, we see all the qualities, the translucency of the creature, we feel that we have a lot of depth in it. Because of the lighting scenario, it's not that visible, but here we see that kind of quality of translucency and understand it's an underwater creature.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, I think the challenge which Seb loves being presented is these super cool creatures as stills, and then it's about kind of reverse engineering ourselves into an animatable creature that has all the qualities that they're asking for. With this, there was the soft flesh, there was the hard shell, there was all that, so there's like a lot of technical pieces that needed to kind of come together to allow the shell to scallop correctly, to allow the tail to work, to allow the limbs to work with all that as well and look like it's all one cohesive piece, plus have the mouth and the Anglerfish kind of characteristics also fit. So, I think that's one of Seb’s strengths.

Eile and Fjord face Anglerfish monster

Sébastien Francoeur: You know, this is something I keep forgetting, but that creature is multiple creatures, but it needs to be one at some point, so you need to make sure that, “Oh that's a snake tail, it really looks like a snake,” and then I just put two creatures together, like a [centaur]. We pulled multiple references from the animal world because that's where the Witcher comes from.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, a lot of the creatures that we've seen during the series have all had — I mean, if we think back to The Witcher, the Myriapod that we did, the there was a lot of inspiration from praying mantis and, again, crabs and stuff like that. That's why we had those weird kind of four legs, but then they also had the creepy kind of hands as well. So their creative team definitely likes to take inspiration from nature and then make it super gross.

Sébastien Francoeur: Also, one of the challenges we have, in that show is we have so few shots. It's going so fast, I think we worked on that for four months and then it's gone within a second in the show. But with that short amount of time, we need to create an identity for that monster. You need to understand what it's doing, what it’s not able to do, and that's something that's a bit challenging when we have not enough time.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, like Seb says, four months of asset development for 30 seconds of screen time, and Seb and our animation supervisor Bernd Angerer worked really hard and really closely together to hit all of the creative notes about selling how this creature is on land versus under the water. Giving it a personality, making it feel threatening, making it feel like Éile can still get away and all that stuff. So, it's a lot of fun and, to quote Seb, “We spend a lot of time creating and building these cool creatures and then kill them.” Because every time we create a creature for The Witcher, we kill it. [Laughs]

Graeme, you had spoken about a little bit earlier about going to different worlds. There is a lot of inspiration taken from the real world in developing a lot of The Witcher, but we also see alternate realities in this show.

Graeme Marshall: We have friends that did [the Arid world], but just we weren’t involved in that. When we get a show, there's obviously the schedule and we have to take pieces that are logical chunks and pieces that we can do within the time frame allowed, that's kind of how it works. That's a large reason why franchises like this, especially, break the show into chunks, and they give a certain environment, or a certain creature, or certain work to a studio to take to finality. This time we got the [one universe], which kept us busy on that episode, and some of our friends from another studio took arid world.

Sébastien Francoeur: Yeah, but we were involved in the Conjunction of the Spheres at the end. We did the Conjunction, it's those five shots that led us to that Conjunction of the Spheres. We were involved from the very beginning into the creation of that. It’s never been clear on what's happening with that Conjunction, so on, we talked about that, we had concepts, but rough concepts, where the world was colliding, you and the showrunner had some kind of feel, like the planets are getting collapsing together, getting destroyed, and that's not where they wanted to go. They had some references, they wanted to see multiple layers and the first iteration of that process was we were literally thinking about space. How can those planets come into one world?

We were thinking about one gate opening in space, the planet coming in, the holes are overlapping, one planet is revealed, and that's what the showrunner was looking for. That fantasy [aesthetic], that non-physical approach, and that's something we've been finding, because our first iteration was — we always think about the physics, how if black holes can exist, they would enter that way, the sun lights it [in a certain] way, but that's not what they were looking for. They were looking for something more fantasy, nondescript, and [it was] kind of visually working, but if you start to study the layer and the depth of it, it doesn't make sense, it just doesn't make sense, and that's cool. That's part of the confusion of what's happening, but it still works.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, part of the beauty of working on a fantasy series is we're allowed to explore those kind of not realistic, non-physically possible avenues of things happening.

Sébastien Francoeur: Also, we were talking about planets collapsing, and then the idea came about aligning them, then we thought maybe they should eat each other, but that felt like destruction. So, we went over more about energy transfer, the planets are lining up, there's some energy transferring from other worlds and then we're kind of merging them. So, it was all those ideas and the main thing was we couldn't think about destroying anything, it's not about destruction, it was all about merging.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, Sébastien and our CG supervisor Loic Beguel collaborated pretty closely with John Moffatt on the client-side, VFX supervisor to work through the problems, work through the creative, because there were a lot of unknowns. Anytime this has ever been mentioned online or anything until now, it was only ever verbally described, there was no visual reference for what this looked like.

Sébastien Francoeur: It's, again, four or five shots, it's very fast. Sometimes we were overthinking the shot, putting too many elements, so we needed to take care of what's the point of every shot? What's really happening, what we want to tell, and because we were very deep into it, sometimes confusion can start to [seep into] those shots, because we're used to seeing it, but for a person who sees it [for the first time], what did he understand? So we needed to make sure it got all the complexity, but simply also [keep up] with the speed of what's happening, that was a challenge.

Eile watches The Conjunction of the Spheres

One of the things that I loved about the Conjunction of the Spheres was the mix of something based in reality, but also something very fantastical. We've seen in a lot of projects lately with portals, whether it be Doctor Strange or The Witcher.

Sébastien Francoeur: Yes, I really inspired myself on Doctor. Strange, because that was one of the first ones to open portals. See the thickness between the world, see those openings, but that's not what he wanted. That's what we realized in the beginning, because I was looking to those as references, I had the tendency for black holes opening with a thickness. Now, it’s a little bit more simplistic and more poetic than something physical. They had a reference in mind, they were looking at film burning, because we were talking about the realm in between. We were looking into a film burning, when 35 millimeter burns, that’s what the entire idea was. The thin film that burns and opens reality.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, like Seb says, they gave us a lot of film burning references. That was what they kind of kept referencing back to, and the membrane I think was the word you're looking for Seb, is the membrane between worlds kind of thing. It's almost like when layers open up. The other thing that we had to be very careful of is the fact that there is actually a portal in the show and we had to be very different from that, to separate the two.

Sébastien Francoeur: It's not the same one, but it's somehow the same magic, so common language, but not doing the same thing over.

We’ve mentioned that the one creature took about four months to make. How long did the Conjunction of the Spheres and its development take?

Graeme Marshall: From first iterations of a really early visualization that we sent them, because on their side, it had been a conversation, there's a very clear idea verbally from their side of what they wanted and it was about all of us getting our minds together in the lining. I think that that was pretty much the duration of the show, we started from pretty much day one talking about how this was going to work.

Then once we started getting more information, and John Moffatt had more conversations on his side with the showrunners and the creatives, that was when Sébastien and John kind of collaborated and went, “Right, what do you think about this? What do you think about that?” There was a lot of back and forth, there was a lot of John collaborating with Seb, he very much felt like a part of the team. We were creatively collaborating on getting the ideas that he was hearing verbally from his side and trying to make them into something tangible that we could deliver as a shot.

Sébastien Francoeur: I think it [was in the works] for eight months or even more. It was a discussion, then a bit of a break, they were thinking on their side, but it's been there for a while. It was put in more serious production for three months, four months, but it's been there for a while under discussion.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, a lot of the shots were designed on the fly, as far as foreground plates that we had of Éile standing on that balcony watching it. A lot of the time they were like, “Oh, we should actually be over the shoulder here,” so we'd get our element plate to throw in, and then we would actually work with that, and work out the timing of each shot to enable us to [display it]. So, again, with John and editorial on their side, we were working on shot links and things like that to try and tell the story in the amount of time we had and amount of shots we had. It was a lot of collaboration across the board with their creative team and ours.

The Conjunction of the Spheres

The Witcher source novels and video games have such a breadth of monsters and creatures to pull from. You've both mentioned that you've had discussions about the future of the show. Are you fans of either source material, and if so, is there any one monster or creature that you're really hoping to get to bring to life?

Sébastien Francoeur: I've played the video game, so I'm aware. I started to read The Witcher after. I want to be involved in those huge monster fights as much as we can. The fun job is to create those monsters.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, we're working on some pretty tasty stuff for the next season. We're at the point where we're showing the creative team now, and they're being wowed by the stuff we're showing them, so that's cool.

Sébastien Francoeur: [We have] a pretty short sequence with a nice creature, but we have a longer one with a big creature, also, that's cool.

Graeme Marshall: We were referencing pretty much one for one some of the magic, and they were like, “No, we can't, we don't want to go down that road.” I think there's a lot of fans of one or the other and you don't upset one without doing something that the other likes, etc. So, they were very careful about keeping it true to the lore, true to the realm, true to the Witcher.

Sébastien Francoeur: Yeah, that's the thing, we cannot follow what has been done on the video game. That's the first rule we learned when doing it, because season 2 is really based on the novel. It's what has been written, it's not the video game, you cannot extract information and start from there. Iit's the same source, but it's another branch literally.

Graeme Marshall: It's like the novels are the guidebook, but not the Bible by any means.

I know RodeoFX has worked on a number of other major projects, where it's so secretive you can't tell people too much. What is that like for you to keep some of those secrets during production and leading up to a show's release?

Sébastien Francoeur: Yeah, I think it's part of our job. It starts to be a little bit natural that we can't really speak of what we're doing, and then when everything comes out now you can speak. I've been in that industry for more than 18 years now, so this is something [I’m used to].

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, we're used to not being able to talk about work.

Sébastien Francoeur: It's like you [know you have a] huge secret, but we signed some NDA, some Non-Disclosure Agreement, so yeah, it's part of the job. But yeah, sometimes you want to spill some stuff, you have a friend that's a big fan of the franchise, you want to speak to, but it's after work.

Graeme Marshall: Yeah, exactly. Those are potentially career ending conversations.

About The Witcher: Blood Origin

The cast from Witcher: Blood Origin.

Set in an elven world 1200 years before the world of The Witcher, Blood Origin tells a story lost to time - one of seven outcasts who unite against an unstoppable power that took everything from them. Their blood quest gives rise to a prototype Witcher in a conflict that brings about the “conjunction of the spheres,” when the worlds of monsters, men, and elves merged to become one.

Check out our other The Witcher: Blood Origin interviews here:

More: Blood Origin Understood 1 Trope Better Than Netflix's The WitcherThe Witcher: Blood Origin is now streaming on Netflix.