ILM.com chat with visual effects supervisor Daniele Bigi about their work on this summers The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), the challenges of creating the Thing, Reed Richards, Sue Richards, Johnny Storm and Galactus and bringing the original Marvel family to the big screen as part of the ever-expanding MCU.
As the ILM visual effects supervisor on The Fantastic Four, Bigi spearheaded ILM’s involvement on the project from the company’s London studio, working closely with invaluable colleagues like ILM animation supervisor Kiel Figgins and ILM senior visual effects producer Claudia Lecaros. “In this case, ILM didn’t split the work between multiple ILM facilities, so my team ended up keeping all the asset and shot work in London. We were assigned the major task of handling the third act of the movie, which centered on the final battle between the Fantastic Four and Galactus,” Bigi tells ILM.com. “Although it’s divided into multiple sequences, the third act is a continuous narrative from Galactus’s arrival on Earth through the end of the film. It was a fascinating and important piece of work to deal with.”
ILM’s assignment included devising an innovative look for Ben Grimm’s iconic alter ego, The Thing. “We did all of the initial development with [production visual effects supervisor] Scott Stokdyk and [visual effects producer] Lisa Marra from Marvel, in collaboration with [head of visual development] Ryan Meinerding. Ryan provided us with the concept for The Thing, which is what we based our work on,” Bigi relays. As the leading vendor for The Thing, ILM developed the entire character and then distributed the asset to the film’s other visual effects vendors for their own sequences.
