'Flash' VFX Boss Talks Changing Speed Effects in Season 3

Whether concerns over The Flash’s central Season 2 mystery prove justified, few would argue that the CW drama’s second run has consistently upped the ante for visual effects on television. Ahead of Zoom-ing into the final episodes of the season, visual effects supervisor Armen Kevorkian opens up on some of the design elements for Season 2's big bad, and how Barry’s look might end up evolving a bit in Season 3.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Kevorkian (who himself directed tonight’s “Rupture”) opened up on some of the impressive visual FX drafted over the second season, not only the CG spectacles of Gorilla Grodd and King Shark, but also the challenge of differentiating Zoom from previous speedsters:

The first step in Zoom was creating his look, and that was a collaboration with the costume department and our producers to create a different kind of speedster look physically. We had two versions: the live action Zoom that you see and then we have an all CG version for certain shots. One thing we decided straight away was that his eyes would be more effective if they were just black to represent the soulless aspect of him.
And instead of vibrating him like we did with Reverse-Flash, we decided because he is in our storyline the fastest speedster around, the crackle of energy is constant on him. And the blue lightning aspect, that was to differentiate him from Flash so when you have them both in the same scene, you wouldn’t get mixed up with the colors of the lightning.

Perhaps most intriguingly, Kevorkian previewed that some effort would be put into revamping effects around Barry for Season 3:

I’m considering for next season to change up the look of his lightning. I think that works with the storyline. The better he has use of his speedster powers, it makes sense that there would be a little shift in his look without doing a 180 and it’s completely different. A little bit of difference year-to-year can’t hurt.

It was easy enough to presume that Barry would get his powers back eventually, but might the second time around in a a particle accelerator change anything about Barry’s abilities, that would alter the effects in Season 3? Stay tuned for tonight’s latest, while we wait.

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