The Big Picture

The second season of “The Wheel of Time” raised the stakes, improved on Season 1, and faced challenges in bringing the fantasy world to life with costumes, props, and sets. Season 2 focused on expanding characters’ storylines, including the hunt for the horn and delving into the backstories of characters like Moraine and Egwene. Love, both romantic and friendship, plays a fundamental role in the series, and the team made sure to prioritize its portrayal on and off camera, creating a sense of kinship among the cast. The visual effects team worked closely with the actors to individualize the channeling and make it complement their performances.

Prime Video’s epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time concluded its second season earlier this month, with a finale that reunited our heroes, and really upped the ante in terms of action and magic. From Moraine (Rosamund Pike) reconnecting with the One Power and channeling on the beach, Lan (Daniel Henny) at her side, to Mat (Dónal Finn) summoning the Heroes of the Horn before finally reuniting with his friends, the finale was full of moments fans could love.

In a series of NYCC roundtables with Collider’s Arezou Amin, The Wheel of Time’s executive producer Marigo Kehoe, VFX Supervisor Andy Scrase and VFX Producer Brian Shows broke down the biggest challenges, and the must-haves in adapting Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic for the screen. Scrase also deep-dives into creating some of the Season 2 finale’s most breathtaking moments.

So Season 2 really ups the scale, ups the ante in just so many ways. What did you find was your biggest challenge in realizing all that?

MARIGO KEHOE: We always wanted to make the show bigger and better and improve on a lot of the things we did in Season 1. It’s always a challenge, this show, because it’s a fantasy world. So you’re making absolutely everything, from every costume, prop, set. Everything we do is a make, or imagination, or talking to all of our team about what they imagine it looks like, and it’s building that world. And we have a huge cast. So it’s all of that.

You mentioned the books earlier, they are sizable volumes of fantasy. Were there key elements that the team really wanted to make sure made it over 100%, no matter what this must be in Season 2?

KEHOE: The whole hunt for the horn, the fact that Heroes of the Horn are expanding Mat’s storyline so that you get a journey. I think the big thing was making sure that each of the characters, you get to know them more. So picking stories from the books that’s going to expand their story. You get to know them and you get invested in them as people. There’s quite a few, you know, Moraine’s backstory with her family. There’s lots of stuff.

Egwene too, I mean, the storyline with her and Renna. For me, that episode 6 was just extraordinary. I think that performance between Egwene and Renna is just so powerful. Also Nyneve, in the earlier episode, in episode 3. And Rand’s story is growing.

Image via Prime Video

One of the things I love about Wheel of Time is how important love is to the story. Romantic love, love between friends, the Aes Sedai and the Warders are just on this whole other level. So I’m guessing that is also important to you. But I want to touch on how you keep that present with the team, making sure that that’s not the first thing to get lost. A lot of times I feel in adaptation, we’re like, “oh, we don’t need that part. Let’s go to the action. Let’s go to the violence.” But it never leaves Wheel of Time.

KEHOE: No. And I think that’s fundamental. It’s a hugely important part of it, both behind the camera and on. We’re all in Prague. So a lot of us are away from home, and it’s become a family, and I think from that, into the scripts, into how we portray that love. It’s real. These guys are all great friends off-camera as well as on, and story-wise, it’s hugely important to have that friendship, that strong feeling of kinship always.

I want to talk about the whole series with the weaving and all of that, particularly in the finale with Moraine [Rosamund Pike] on the beach. I wanna talk about realizing all that, mixing the magic on the VFX side with the choreography. What goes into that?

ANDY SCRASE: Certainly for me just to start, the chanelling for me was my number one perogative to look at and see what I could bring to it on the show. And from that, you know, not just VFX is involved in it, as you pointed out, we have the choreography with Scarlett Mackmin who works with the actors on that. So we have those two different components.

But on the show, what I also did was I spoke to, I think pretty much every single cast member that can channel just to get their input on their character, and what they’re thinking about with channeling, because I was very interested in seeing “Is there a way I can individualize the channeling?” Not so much from the look of the threads, which always stay the same, but more from the way it behaves around them and moves around them.

So especially with someone like Alanna [Priyanka Bose], you know, it’s a lot more sort of caressing around because of how she is as a character and being a Green Ajah. With Leandrin, it’s a lot more taut and tight because she’s always got the power but just held back ready to strike with it. This was certainly something Kate Fleetwood said to me. And then with Rosamund [Pike], I spoke to her about three or four times regarding her channeling on the beach at the end. It was after she’d shot, and then we were working the visual effects and I found it really interesting speaking to the cast members, getting their input on it, because what it then does is it means your channelling can then start complimenting their performance.

If you pick up on what they were thinking in their thought process when they were performing, then it gives you something that’s just gonna work in tandem a lot more and it was really exciting to work with Rosamund to get her inputs on it. She was very excited to see the progress, because we used to show her work in progress as we went along. And I think that probably, because of discussing things with all the different cast members, it allowed us just to elevate the channeling itself and give it a little bit more personality.

It’s actually something Brian [Shows] said early on in the show, was we wanted to make the channeling feel like a character itself. There was almost a little bit of an evolution as we move through the show. And by the time we get to episode 8, that’s I think the pinnacle of our channelling for this season, and something I will then take on and develop and tweak and improve as we move into future seasons.

Image Via Prime Video

Another sequence I really want to talk about is the Heroes of the Horn in the finale. From your perspective, can you talk about bringing that whole sequence to life?

SCRASE: Yeah, absolutely. The Heroes of the Horn, the horn being blown, and the heroes appearing. It’s definitely a standout moment for the fan base, so one I was really interested in working. In this instance, in the books when Mat blows the horn, a fog appears. So that’s exactly what I wanted to do, create this mystical fog that appeared around where Mat was standing and from there have our heroes appear within that.

And it was the appearing of the heroes within this mystical fog I really focused on, because I was really interested in seeing how we can make that work without repeating things that people have been seeing before. I was looking at things like the Holi festival and powder paints and fireworks within smoke. And there was some really interesting imagery that came out of that, which we then translated across into the heroes effect itself. If you notice when the heroes start emerging all the flashes of color represent the costumes that they’re wearing. I’m always trying to bring a bit of individuality where we can.

What would you say has been the most surprising challenge of it all in realizing this fantasy world and making it real?

BRIAN SHOWS: I’m trying to think of how to answer that. I think that would be a good one for Andy [Scrase]. He’s on the producer side of it. He’s the creative on it. So he could dive into that. We collaborate behind the scenes, right? Like I filter stuff into him. We give ideas and we have inspirational boards and things like that where he finds inspiration in things that are real or things that are in art.

And then we talk about those, or we talk about prior experience on different shows, and what stuff was cool or how we can accomplish tasks. I’m more of the practical person in the background trying to figure out how to accomplish the tasks that he comes up with.

Image via Prime Video

So, logistically, this was all…I don’t want to say fairly straightforward because that feels like a simplification.

SHOWS: it’s complicated in a way that it’s worldwide. So there’s obstacles if you want to talk about that. We have a team of people in Prague who are shooting and I go back and forth from Prague. We have a team in London who are posting at the same time as we’re shooting. I’m in LA, and then we’re around the globe constantly, or we’re in remote locations where we have a second unit or a unit that’s in another country shooting stuff. So, logistically, it can be quite complicated, and that’s part of my part. So it’s not nearly as exciting as the cool pictures [Laughs]. But there’s a lot that goes into making sure that this is [working]. You can have all the greatest ideas in the world but if we can’t figure out how to make it work and get them on screen. It doesn’t work.

Is it fair to ask what the most difficult concept to realize on your end was? Of his concepts when it funnels over to you?

SHOWS: My part is very practical in application, right? We go out and we find solutions, technology wise, to get him what he needs to do. We have a team, a great team of people. The Production Manager Julia [Markó], she’s great too. And we try to find every tool set that he could possibly want or need to make the vision come to life.

You can watch The Wheel of Time on Prime Video now.