The VFX Tech Behind The Boys Season 3's Infamous Termite Scene
The first two seasons of the Prime Video series "The Boys," based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, were some seriously wild television. So when the third season premiered, the team behind the series knew they had to up the ante, creating a scene based on a popular Ant-Man and Thanos meme that would blow anything from the previous two seasons out of the water. (Yes, even the whale.) In one of the first scenes of season 3, Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), Frenchie (Tomer Capone), and Butcher (Karl Urban) are staking out a party with some known supes in attendance when there's a totally bizarre sex accident that leaves one man dead and another traumatized for life.
In one of the bedrooms at the party, a supe called Termite (Brett Geddes), who can change his size and strength in a similar manner to Marvel's Ant-Man, is having some kinky fun with his lover (Jarrett Siddall) when things go terribly, horribly wrong. They decide to use Termite's shrinking powers to do some superhuman sounding, with Termite shrinking down to tickle and tease the inside of his lover's penis. Unfortunately he also ends up with a tickle in his nose and sneezes, popping his paramour like an overfilled water balloon. It's one seriously wild scene that took a tremendous amount of work to pull off, including building a giant penis for Geddes to crawl into! In an interview with IndieWire, visual effects supervisor Stephan Fleet explained all of the icky secrets that went into making this mind-and-body-blowing scene come to life. Here's one hint: It involved lots of fake blood.
A matter of scale
If you think that trying to create the insane visuals of a man walking around inside of another man's penis might be complicated, you would be right. Fleet explained that just figuring out the scale of the miniatures and oversized props required a tremendous amount of research:
"Weirdly, that scene has the most amount of research both creatively and technically for me. I didn't want to mess up the miniature shooting and scaling of it, so I researched the crap out of it."
That research meant figuring out the right scale for everything from cigarettes to lines of cocaine, and they had to sacrifice some of the little details in order to make everything work together visually. They combined techniques, using body doubles, forced perspective (similar to how they made the Hobbits small in "The Lord of the Rings"), prosthetics, and computer-generated effects, along with a giant exploding blood bag. "It's a little fantastical but every time we showed it, it got a big laugh and it works," he explained. "It was a real collaboration between prosthetics, stunts, special effects, visual effects, set decoration and props."
Fleet also found that a shallow depth of field helped make everything look like it was the right size, which matters a lot when you're dealing with something so fantastical. The resulting scene looks incredible, and if Hollywood ever decides to make a gross-out R-rated reboot of the "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" series, they know who to call.
The first three seasons of "The Boys" are streaming on Prime Video.