Johnny Han, Goran Pavles, and Eugene Bondar: Inside the VFX of The Penguin
The Emmy-winning VFX team of The Penguin revealed the creative process for bringing Gotham to life in the HBO limited series.
This interview was conducted in partnership with VIEW Conference. Johnny Han, Goran Pavles, and Eugene Bondar will be featured speakers at VIEW Conference 2025, taking place October 12–17 in Turin, Italy.
Matt Reeves’ take on the caped crusader, The Batman, has the perfect blend of gritty, dark realism combined with stylistic cinematography, defining a new depiction of Gotham and its citizens–a city that is tainted with chaos, corruption, and hopelessness. These themes carried through the film’s direct television sequel, The Penguin, where Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb takes the audience into the darkest corners of Gotham whose recent flood disaster has left it on its knees and commenced an outright war between the most powerful mob families. The show swept a total of 9 Emmy Awards this season, including Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode. Overall VFX supervisor Johnny Han, joined by vendor VFX supervisors Stormborn Studios’ Goran Pavles and FrostFX’s Eugene Bondar for a deep dive into the creation of Gotham for The Penguin, from visual continuity with the film to developing the city’s own identity.
As a rite of passage, one of the preliminary meetings was with The Batman’s VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon and VFX producer Bryan Searing, sifting through every shot of the film to understand the look and tone of the show and applying it to The Penguin. The opening act of the TV series, Han explained, was “meant to be as close as possible, so it’s super orange, golden and reddish, and then as the episode continues and the season continues, it gains an identity of its own. We get a lot more cooler colors, a lot more blues, especially once we’re into Oz’s underground lair … we’re very much on the total opposite side of the color wheel. The show is now his; he’s no longer the side character.” He added that ultimately it came down to Lauren LeFranc and Matt Reeves’ reviews: “They were the ultimate gatekeepers of the look, and even between the two, they would temper each other where sometimes Matt would want really pronounced optical effects and Lauren wanted to scale it back, and so that happy medium is actually what we ended up with, which I think is exactly how it should be … it was just the right kind of subtlety, but still cool and optically correct. We definitely worked hard to make it look like a direct sequel to The Batman. This story is meant to take place a week after the movie, so it had to be able to literally feel like a continuation.”
Even though plenty of reference was provided from The Batman to reconstruct Gotham for the show, the VFX team wanted to truly enrich the city’s identity. As a jumping-off point and to keep cohesion across vendors, they amassed a library of reference plates that featured Manhattan–each asset classified in different categories (daytime, nighttime, etc), managed by Piers Dennis. “The challenge was to modify that to look more like Gotham. We also used a lot of references for Gothic architecture in Vancouver and implemented them into our matte paintings,” Goran Pavles shared. Chicago was also researched to achieve that distinct neo-Gothic look, and with that Johnny Han and the rest of the team set a few visual rules, trying “not to have too many square top buildings but instead add a lot of spires and ornate stonework.”
To highlight the corruption that plagued Gotham, The Penguin’s VFX team created a cityscape rough around the edges. Eugene Bondar added depth and character to the city in a subtle way to allow the audience to feel the invisible grip of organized crime: “We just tried to remind every now and then that this is what was going on in the city. We did a lot of set extensions, adding unfinished skyscrapers in Gotham’s skyline … something that you probably never notice, but you feel it. I would say every fourth or fifth building is unfinished.”
The world of The Penguin has a story in every shot, and every detail gets to shine in the daylight. Even if the audiences don’t notice it, they feel a sense of familiarity to each neighborhood as the story progresses. Oz’s neighborhood is a true reflection of his character, growing up as a low level gangster in a district populated by jewelry stores and fish markets–subconsciously defining his penguin persona. “We changed a lot of different signs, and I would say every second window or door was made into a store. When young Oz is looking through the window in episode seven, we put a small sign of a fish market … There are tons of interesting easter eggs hiding everywhere,” Bondar shared. Johnny Han added, “Oz lives above Burgess Jewelry, a reference to the actor [Burgess Meredith] who played the Penguin in the 1960s Batman TV series. It was a subtle nod, or maybe not so subtle! In post we have the flexibility to continue to be creative and make locations more identifiable for the character.” FrostFX also added an extra layer of drama, tension, and atmosphere to Gotham in a very intentional way by compositing rain and unique wet lens flares–utilizing different gels like silicone and hand sanitizer.
The Batman’s climactic moment, the flood, forever scars Gotham. Whereas the film’s take was on an epic disaster scale, The Penguin made the catastrophic event much more emotional and personal through the eyes of Victor Aguilar. Johnny Han revealed that the original idea and execution of the scene had a less intimate feel: “When the bombs started going off, we were cutting to different parts of the city. The Batman had a shot like that from Arkham, when Batman is visiting Riddler … that was our reference, so we’re like, ‘All right, let’s do more of that.’ Long story short, it just wasn’t working for everyone; it’s just not emotional. Victor isn’t moving around; he’s just on the ledge. There’s no danger.” Along with Chris Anderson, Han storyboarded Victor’s point of view according to Reeves and LeFranc’s notes: “He can’t see all of them, he falls to the ground, it gives him some more movement and danger. We don’t get a full glimpse of a close-up explosion until he gets up off the floor, and this was really important. He’s getting up off the floor to the ledge, and the camera is leveled with him so that as his eyes see the explosion … we see at the same moment he does, and take in this big shocking moment. We’re not anticipating it; we are the character. Victor only cares about one thing, his family, and is helplessly watching them perish.”
Johnny Han revealed that the rooftop scene was initially filmed on a real location, but the team did a separate additional photography shoot for the bomb explosions and the flood on stage, where they rebuilt part of the rooftop on blue screen. To heighten the visual impact of the explosions on camera and for the actor’s performances, the team utilized big, tungsten lights because “LED panels didn’t give the right spectral response to mimic fire … they’re fading on and fading off; it is not natural. When you use a big hot tungsten light, it takes a second or two to even ramp on. It’s a function of energy, and then it takes several seconds to cool off. It’s so innately inherent to how real black-body radiation works. It really helped because part of the gag was that Victor doesn’t see exactly where all the bombs are at first, but he can feel the heat from these lights,” Han explained. Then Goran Pavles delved into the compositing for the tragic scene: “In the flood sequence it’s very obvious, there’s the VFX, but because it is so in your face, everything else just kind of blends away and one doesn’t even realize it. The big aha moment was really to pay attention to the small details and use a lot of lens effects like flares, depth of field, blurs, color bleedings, and so on–just letting the compositors do their work. They were really able to blend away the added VFX that replaced the blue screen, and it just looked really, really convincing.”
“We were very conscious of trying to tell the viewer what neighborhood you were in, based on what neighborhood you weren’t in. We always tried to hint at the struggle of the rich versus the poor.”
The aftermath of the flood is what visually separates The Penguin from The Batman. Gotham will never be the same, and the structural damage, debris, and overall signs of the water destruction created a stark divide between the rich and the poor. “We were very conscious of trying to tell the viewer what neighborhood you were in, based on what neighborhood you weren’t in. We always tried to hint at the struggle of the rich versus the poor, and so anytime we’re in a poor neighborhood, we would make buildings really high in the background. The haves would be looking down from a safe place in judgment to the poor neighborhoods.” Johnny Han then revealed an unplanned detail that was added to episode five: “We are in Crown Point when Victor takes Francis, Oz’s mother to their new hiding place … they’re in the heart of Victor’s neighborhood that got destroyed. It just felt really important to show the seawall. We have a few subtle shots where you see the seawall … that it’s sort of repaired, but repaired in the most minimally possible way for a poor neighborhood because you don’t have the funds to rebuild. So you can see there’s scaffolding and there’s still the lines of the cracks. We even have subtle streams of water pouring through the concrete as if it’s not even totally sealed. We really cared even if we weren’t a huge budget show that could do big helicopter shots. It wasn’t until post where we found moments that we’re never filmed with that intention.”
Another epic moment is the explosion of Oz Cobb’s lair. Sofia Gigante’s strike on his underground operation was not supposed to be as grandiose as we see in the final cut of the episode. The ultimate spectacle was Johnny Han’s determination to add an important element to truly showcase Sofia’s impact and shift of power. “When we planned to film this scene basically we were told that we don’t have the money to show anything. Oz sees the bomb, runs into a tunnel and escapes. We had one practical pyrotechnic effect to show flames behind him. And it was meant to end in that way. But this is where I think visual effects are just a lot of fun. It’s a pretty important moment where Victor thinks Oz is dead and Sofia gets what she wanted … Did she win?” Han pitched additional underground effects for the car explosion and also the aerial shot–a combination of helicopter footage from The Batman and geospatial data from the set location, and the result was pure storytelling. “Everyone loved it. I think it’s my job personally to help enable the filmmakers to get what they would like to get, in some way. I don’t know how the scene would have worked without those added VFX shots,” Han said.
The ending of The Penguin is a win for Oz Cobb in the most twisted way. He’s finally made it to the top of the food chain, defeating all his enemies and fulfilling a promise to his mother–to buy her the penthouse, surrounded by all the richness of the heart’s desire. However, that is Oz’s view of a much darker reality: Francis is comatose, Eve impersonates her, and the penthouse is a semi-abandoned hotel called La Couronne. “It has a very distinct vertical red neon sign, and it sort of looks like the Flatiron Building in Gramercy, New York. That hotel is visible in every other skyline starting from episode one because we wanted to subtly plant it that that’s where Oz is going to end up–even in the flashbacks when he’s a kid, it’s visible but in a less abandoned state. I don’t know if anyone noticed it, but it was one of those geographic anchors,” Johnny Han said.
For more insights on the VFX of The Penguin, join the conversation at VIEW Conference 2025 this October in Turin, Italy.
