Duncan Jones on Warcraft’s visual effects, Avengers influence, and sequel

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

It's been a long road but the post-production work on Duncan Jones' WARCRAFT is approaching the homestretch. When WARCRAFT was announced several years ago we knew that it would require a vast amount of complicated VFX work in order to turn it into something worthy of the Warcraft name.

Duncan Jones sat down with Wired and opened up about the time-consuming visual effects process involved in bringing the characters of Azeroth to life. Despite the large amount of VFX, Jones tried to keep the process as grounded in reality as they could:

Motion capture has become very specialized but also still just a tool of filmmaking, we tried to do a lot of large, in-camera sets so that we had an actual reality that the film was built on top of. Some of the time we had [actors doing motion capture] on location, some of the time we had them on set, sometimes there was green screen.

During the development of the Orc characters, Duncan Jones found inspiration from another large muscle-bound CG creature; the Hulk. Visual effects supervisor Jeff White had previously worked on the design of the Hulk in THE AVENGERS and that design was used as a stepping stone in the creation of the Orcs.

He absolutely nailed that character, and orcs feel like they may have some of the same genetic background as the Hulk. When we found out that Jeff himself was actually an avid Warcraft player as well, it became clear how excited he was about playing in this universe, it was a match made in heaven.

We're still more than a year away from WARCRAFT's June 10, 2016 release date but the possibility of a sequel has already been raised. Duncan Jones said that if he'd love to work on the potential sequel so long as he had "the good fortune to work with the same group of people," but also added that he'd prefer to work on a project of his own creation after work on WARCRAFT has been completed.