It’s been just over a year since WandaVision first hit Disney+, so while we wait for the Scarlet Witch to return in Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness to grapple with the whole “so I was understandably quite sad and magically took it out on a small town/a witch passing by/the synthetic corpse of my android lover” deal, in the meantime, ILM has given us a great chance to look back and see the series’ emotional finale come together.
Rather literally, as the VFX house’s latest Marvel reel is about the composition of the moment Wanda brings down the Hex around Westview altogether, saying goodbye to the vision of, well, The Vision, that she had conjured as her loving husband. You get to see how it started on set — with Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany being circumnavigated a moveable lighting and green-screen rig being pushed around, until Bettany has to almost comically rapidly step out of camera for the final moments of his “disintegration,” and then see it slowly build up through layers of VFX to the final moment.
And there’s a ton of cool little details in those effects shown off too, like the individual flashes for all the older versions of Wanda and Vision’s house from the show, and of course all the rigging to turn Bettany’s dot-covered Vision make up into the synthezoid we all know and love. Especially interesting in that regard is a brief moment in Vision’s disintegration where we see the “nerves” of his body breaking down — and how the pattern we see was actually designed in reference to a similar moment from Age of Ultron, when we see the golden system light up upon the Soul Stone being embedded in Vision’s forehead. Just as we saw when he was “born,” so as he was when he “died,” it’s a nice little touch that makes an already sad scene that much sadder, just in case you thought you were done being emotional over a TV show at this point.