Wakanda Forever VFX team offers a deeper look into the film’s stunning underwater scenes

Speaking to Chris White of Wētā FX, who led the visual effects team on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, ScreenRant received more information on how the team created the film’s spectacular underwater scenes. It turns out that a lot – and we mean a lot – of work went into perfecting how everything looked underwater, including the actors themselves. White told ScreenRant that the end result was a combination of CGI with practical effects. “We need to find a balance,” he said. “A lot of what we filmed in the tank; the mining mission was CGI, but we filmed it in a tank as a great reference using real suits. domes, refraction means their heads look very small. We had to make special tools to sort of reverse that, to find a balance so that Shuri’s head could look like it was underwater without losing the expression on her face.”

Since the production required the actors to be physically underwater, ensuring that skin tones were rendered while they were submerged was another challenge. Under water, light works differently, especially red light, which matches human skin tones. To make everything look realistic, the VFX team made it their mission to develop the necessary tools to achieve this goal. They studied how melanin affects how people look underwater and used digital images of the actors as a reference to stay accurate.

The members of the visual effects team weren’t the only ones hard at work perfecting the underwater scenes. According to Diversitymany actors, even director Ryan Coogler, learned how to swim to make Wakanda Forever the best movie ever.