‘Ted’ Season 2 VFX Team Interview

Making a raunchy plush teddy bear feel believable in the real world is a balancing act that requires a lot more constraint than audiences might understand. 

For the creative team behind Peacock’s Ted, the goal has never been to remind viewers that Ted is a visual effect. Instead, every creative decision from performance, editing to practical effects and digital artistry is designed to make Seth MacFarlane’s iconic bear feel just like another member of the cast. In Season 2, that ethos was put to the test as it expands the series’ scope with more fantasy sequences, elaborate practical creature work, a digitally recreated Bill Clinton and a hilarious bedroom gag involving satin sheets and an attachable member. 

Below, Deadline talks to visual effects supervisors Blair Clark, Hoyt Yeatman and executive producer and editor Tom Costantino about crafting the season’s most technically challenging sequences and the unbreakable rules they keep in place to make sure audiences never notice one bear out of place. 

 DEADLINE: How did you work with Ted’s showrunners to push the boundaries for Season 2? What did those conversations look like? 

BLAIR CLARK: We usually start with a table read with the department heads, and all of those questions came up. Of course, Seth [MacFarlane] has all the answers. For example, there was a dildo. But it wasn’t just like, “There’s a dildo.” There were more dimensions to it like – how big is it? What color is it? Our prop master had a contraption made and fit to the stuffy that we got notes on and adjusted. [Laughs].

One of the big things I remember was figuring out the snow (the show takes place in Massachusetts). The first versions of the scripts had snow in a lot of them. We talked about that, and it got significantly narrowed down to a couple of episodes, which made it a little easier to handle.

TOM COSTANTINO: We also had to analyze it because we were reaching such great heights that we further had to ground the acting and keep things rooted. There had to be a linear part of this where we were in reality because, obviously, they get sucked into a Dungeons & Dragons game. There is a giant purple apparatus, the Abortomatic 76. You have to have some kind of humanity in it to make it play right.

DEADLINE: I was reading a quote from Seth MacFarlane that basically said, “The bear is funny when we put him in the real world. If my scenes are too whimsical, then it doesn’t work.” Talk a bit more about the guardrails you all have to keep yourselves from straying too far into the outlandish. 

CLARK: As far as the bear, one of our main priorities was maintaining the personality from the films and the first season of Ted and making sure he was exactly the same bear. From Day 1, it was always an exercise in restraint and keeping it grounded and simple because there aren’t a lot of things that move on Ted, but his eyes don’t move and things like that. He is very simplistic, so if you’re not careful and try to compensate for those features that aren’t really expressive, he goes cartoony very fast. Then the whole thing falls apart because you’re suddenly aware you’re looking at something cartoony and outlandish.

YEATMAN: And animated.

CLARK: Yeah. You’re not looking at another actor in the cast.

COSTANTINO: I think restraint goes for every aspect of our production and post. The actors really understand that Ted, to them, is alive. When we cut the show, Ted is alive. We never let anyone in on the joke that Ted is a whimsical creature. He’s just there. He goes to school. He has dinner. Well, he’s a bear, but he’s a real-life person. It’s the same thing Airplane! used to do. Everyone tells jokes deadpan. The minute they become self-aware of the comedy, it dies. That’s how we keep it in line.

CLARK: And that went for the actors as well as the background players. Don’t do double takes at him or anything like that. He’s just another kid. He’s a short kid.

DEADLINE: Tom as the editor, I can’t imagine the weight on your shoulders when it comes to what comedy bits stay in and what is left on the floor. Was there a particularly challenging episode to put together because you thought, “We can’t have all of this stuff in here?” 

COSTANTINO: It’s challenging in the sense that when I cut, my goal is to give VFX the best fighting chance of being able to put the bear in. But it’s empty plates and a voiceover that sometimes we’ll even re-record again. So, it’s really just the mind’s-eye version of Ted. We do some improv. The thing that I love is that Seth and his writing team spend a lot of time crafting this. There are opportunities for improv. Someone like Don Lake comes in, he comes from the Waiting for Guffman world, and there’s tons of material to go through. That’s where you have to use the discipline of taking the best of the 400 jokes that come in.

Mostly, my goal is not to screw up the timing. We get down to the field or the frame in terms of the jokes. There’s a lot of under-the-hood work to make sure everything is paced within an inch of its life so that the rhythm keeps going.

CLARK: And that helps visual effects as well because there are very few changes or rewrites. That can be devastating for visual effects because there’s a lot of work that goes into even a second of this stuff. It’s all hand-done and layered. If you suddenly get, “Oh, he’s going to say a different line,” then you have to go back to the start. Rarely, does that happen on a Seth show. 

DEADLINE: I want to talk about the Dungeons & Dragons episode, aptly named “Dungeons & Dealers,” that was a fun episode to watch. It was also giving a little bit of Indiana Jones. Talk about putting that episode together.

COSTANTINO: That was one of those episodes where things were pretty precise. Where there was a lot of freedom was figuring out how to create the danger of the Temple of Doom-style spikes coming down while still making sure the jokes landed. Trying to interweave those things is a real challenge because you can’t play the jeopardy so long that the joke run gets killed. That took a little honing.

DEADLINE: What kind of inspirations did you bring in when creating how the dungeon looked?

YEATMAN: Well, Indiana Jones was definitely one of them because it was written around that. What was fun for me was the environmental work. We had a very large forest build. The forest filled Stage 9 at Universal almost to the brim. The tree branches were probably within eight or nine inches of the blue screen. The blue screen was about 40 feet high and roughly 300 linear feet. It wrapped about 306 degrees around the set. The crew did an amazing job building it and making it look real, but obviously you’d see through those trees to the blue screen. Our job in visual effects was to continue that look and give it atmosphere.

A lot of it is magical. There are little bits of fairy dust. If you look closely, there are beams of sunlight coming through. Those kinds of lighting and atmospheric effects really can’t be done on a stage that big because you can’t get a single-source light far enough back to create those rays. So that’s all done invisibly by visual effects. It gives the environment a more magical feel, which is exactly what we were trying to do.

For me, that was a lot of fun because we’re building a world that hopefully you feel and see, but don’t consciously think about while you’re watching it. It just happens.

CLARK: And for the creatures, pretty much all of them were created by Howard Berger and his company, KNB EFX. They did an amazing job. Pretty much all of the creatures were practical makeup. Even for the statues, they made these stiff gowns that the dancers would sort of clamshell into. Their arms and heads were positioned in a way that kept them stationary like statuary. Then there was the demon. We augmented a few things slightly. We added wings to the demon and a slight ripple effect on his skin, like a heat wave coming off of him. But they did an amazing job.

DEADLINE: Blair, Ted’s movements and physicality are so distinct. Has anything really changed over time in your years working on Ted across film and TV?

CLARK: Not really. It’s all dependent on what’s scripted. He does things like crawling into a vending machine and getting squished against the glass. There are a lot of things like that that are one-off situations. But personality-wise, he hasn’t changed. If anything has been modified from the features through now, it’s all under the hood making him render faster and look better while staying consistent.

DEADLINE: What about that bathtub sequence? Was there anything particularly difficult about that? 

YEATMAN: Bubbles, right?

CLARK: Yeah. We had a rig that was basically a ball that could move the bubbles around a little bit, so it wasn’t just a static clump of bubbles representing him. That wasn’t too bad. I think the harder scenes were when he’s in bed with Mrs. Robichek and dealing with the movement of the sheet because it was a satin sheet. [Laughs]. We had a portion of the stuffy, which was basically the torso under the covers with the [dildo] apparatus attached. We puppeteered it slightly just to keep it alive during the shot. That gave movement to the sheet and pillow. That kind of interaction goes a long way toward selling his presence.

COSTANTINO: I have a 20-minute take of Blair just moving sheets. [Laughs]. 

CLARK: I was trying to get the right position. [Laughs]. 

YEATMAN: But there’s some magic in getting things in-camera and creating real, grounded plates where you’re physically interacting with the environment. That’s really important in making the effects look successful.

COSTANTINO: You have to approach it from two fronts: the acting side and the technical side. If one doesn’t work, the entire illusion falls apart.

DEADLINE: OK, so let’s get to the Bill Clinton appearance of it all. How did you put this together? I’m sure there were a lot of tools and techniques involved. 

YEATMAN: It was an interesting sequence. It’s about 38 shots and runs roughly two-and-a-half minutes, so it’s not a huge piece in terms of screen time, but it required a lot of thought. The first thing we did was hire an archivist. She went to the Bill Clinton Presidential Library and acquired portraits and video footage of Clinton from that time period, around 1993, because we wanted to study how he moved and how he looked on camera. One of the first things I remember noticing was how bad the video footage from that era is. We all lived through it, but looking back now, it’s really rough. There wasn’t much to work with.

There were no head scans from that period and no casting materials, so we didn’t have any physical reference of Bill Clinton from that era. The first thing we did was hire a CG artist, a ZBrush artist. He found one of the portraits from that period, researched it extensively, tracked down the photographer, obtained information on the lensing and technical data, and created what we call a single point sculpt. He sculpted a 3D model that matched that portrait perfectly. That became a template that we could use in 3D alongside current scans we had of Seth from projects like The Orville.

What we quickly discovered, somewhat to our concern, was that the two heads were very different. Different shapes, different sizes, different eye positions, everything. That ruled out traditional makeup. You can add makeup, but you can’t really subtract. A lot of the differences were structural. At that point, collectively with the studio, we decided to pursue a traditional visual-effects route. This was before AI became part of the conversation. We knew it wasn’t going to be a mask replacement; it would need to be a full head replacement because of how different the two men looked. Clinton’s hair is also very iconic, so that became part of the challenge.

We built a process that allowed us to capture Seth’s performance on set without requiring him to wear a bunch of equipment. He could simply act. That was important because he needed to perform in scenes with multiple actors and multiple cameras without disrupting production. From that process, we were able to generate a three-dimensional mesh that moved in sync with Seth’s performance. We then applied that to a CG head derived from the original Clinton sculpt. We worked on that for several months. The problem is that humans understand faces instinctively. We know immediately when something isn’t right. We kept running into the uncanny valley. We could not get it to cross that final threshold into feeling completely real. If we couldn’t make it look completely real, the sequence wouldn’t work. The audience would spend the entire time looking at the effect instead of listening to the jokes.

To see more behind the scenes VFX work from Fuzzy Door Productions, check out the video above.