Black Adam is a visually wild film, even beyond the titular powerhouse and his variety of abilities. It's a film with demonic forces of nature, an entire team of colorful superheroes with different abilities and costume designs, and even an army of the dead. For all of this to work, a team of visual effects artists from around the globe came together to bring the massive DC characters to life -- with visual effects companies like Digital Domain helping visualize magic forces usually only glimpsed on the comic page.

During an interview with CBR, Black Adam's Visual Effects Supervisor Nikos Kalaitzidis and Digital Effects Supervisor Greg Teegarden spoke about juggling Black Adam's brutal edge with a comical edge, the process of replicating specific panels from the original comics, working with special effects teams around the world to find new uses of classic superpowers, and what surprised them the most about working on the film.

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CBR: The difference in the JSA's looks compared to the monochrome look and blunt use of Black Adam's powers is a really fun visual way of differentiating the two forces. He's just such a force of nature. Was that something the team was conscious of during production?

Nikos Kalaitzidis: When we were on set, we had a couple of sequences where Black Adam crashes through each of the rooms of an apartment because, for some reason, he doesn't want to use a door. The filmmakers explained it to us, when he comes through, let's make sure that he's going to be clean and pristine, and everything just rolls off like Teflon. That's just who he was. He was just that super.

On the flip side of that, you know, to touch upon what you said earlier, he had no problem going dark. One of the first sequences we did, where we reveal Black Adam in today's modern world, he annihilates these mercenaries. It was the first time we had a taste to see what Black Adam was all about. We tried to make it dark. It's in a dark place, which is also a metaphor for how dark he was to annihilate all these mercenaries without any grief or hesitation.

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One of the things about Black Adam in the film is he has to be a certain amount of terrifying -- he's a guy who can melt people with lightning -- but he has to also be the hero of the film. From a visual standpoint, how did you and the rest of the team approach that balancing act?

Greg Teegarden: In the sequence where he's first revealed, he goes ballistic on those mercenaries, and he's taking them out one after the other -- I mean, one guy, he picks them up by the feet and pounds his head into the ground and then throws them up into an RPG. But there's also a part in there where he recognizes Adriana. He recognizes the necklace around her neck and uses his powers to protect her. It's like he can use his powers for good or for evil.

You get the sense right away that he has a connection with her. We're not quite sure what it is at first. But that's where a bit of his humanity comes in into effect. In that sense, he's kind of playing both characters. He's playing the character that he's going to become at the end of the movie a little bit -- but just a little bit. Most of it is geared around just taking these guys out because they're clearly the bad guys, and we're kind of rooting for him to take these guys out.

Luckily, he's fighting some pretty bad guys throughout the whole film.

Kalaitzidis: He was just tossing them left and right! Greg and I even had a drinking game at the end of the film with the rest of our artists. Every time he throws somebody, we got to do a shot of tequila or something. He didn't think twice about just tossing somebody. Sure enough, a lot of that's still in the movie.

It's so darkly comedic to watch him flinging people around like that.

Kalaitzidis: Yeah, they definitely had a humor portion attributed to the movie. It's comic relief. To tell you the truth, they even had more sequences that had that sort of comic relief, but at the end of the day, a lot of it got cut out of the movie.

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You got to play with Black Adam and the very different looks, designs, and powers of the rest of the Justice Society. What was it like getting to jump into that sandbox?

Kalaitzidis: [The film's director, Jaume Collet-Serra] really kept true to a lot of the comic books and the styles they have for each of those characters. And then we added a little more to that. For instance, when Atom-Smasher would grow or get smaller, when his powers would activate, the lines in his costume would be animated in the texture to give us just a bit of that sense of technology within the suit that activates in growth or compression.

Coming up with those ideas, or working with the filmmakers, or if somebody else did some other power for a different character, they would share with us, and we would share with them. It was really a coming together of minds within everyone that's been working on this film. Not just what we did at Digital Domain, but what others would do too -- big shout out to WETA and Scanline, who'd come up with ideas, then we would share our ideas with them and brainstorm across the globe with everybody on all these characters, which was pretty awesome. Look at Hawkman. He has this nine-foot wingspan, right? He had to fight Black Adam in this little bedroom. When we were shooting it on set, we even tried to give him some wings to make it feel like he's got something in there. We'd figure out how to really compress those wings and what to do with those wings.

Not only did it come out and compress back, but we also used it as a weapon -- chop up furniture and toss it. It's not just meant to fly, but it's also meant for an attack, and he used it as a shield. What if he turns around really fast and protects himself? Or if he's crashing through a wall, what if he just cocooned himself in the wings? There were a lot of ideas and brainstorming that we did among ourselves, and then we would share it with the filmmakers.

They'd come up with different ideas and then feed us, and it was really a conglomeration of just brainstorming at its most saturated and colorful. The creativity we had to go into what the powers were for each of the JSA characters, was more or less done after the shoot. The good thing about the shoot, is that we were working on the characters. We'd be showing it to Jaume on set.

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Were there any specific moments where the team was specifically drawing on sequences from the original comics or was it more important to focus on Jaume's vision for the film?

Kalaitzidis: There were two specific shots. One was an end scene where Black Adam sits on the throne. There was a comic book picture of Black Adam doing the same thing. You could see how they really tried to align with that iconic comic design. Another one is that on set, we had an LED set where Black Adam takes these mercenaries and brings them up into the clouds. It was these storm clouds with lightning all over, and it was beautiful. There was a particular comic that the filmmakers actually showed me on set, saying this is like straight out of the comic books. Check it out. It was great because it gave us inspiration moving forward.

What would you say surprised you the most about the production for Black Adam?

Teegarden: I think the most pleasant surprise was, once we figured out what the visual language was for our sequences, how relatively effortless it was to take these shots, to take them home. The mercenary fight, we really weren't quite sure what this chamber was supposed to look like. It wasn't until Nikos got back from shooting even though we were building everything ahead of time. We had these LED walls that we were that we had to put the characters into -- it looked a lot different than what the actual set piece looked like.... but once we got the plates back, and we figured out what this room looks like, what the mood of it is, it was very straightforward.

It was artistically satisfying to get the sequence done because it just became a point where the whole team knew exactly what we were supposed to do. We were pushing the shots out. Once we got that momentum going, that carried into Adriana's apartment with the fight with Hawkman and Black Adam, and the same thing with the sequence of them going up into the clouds. We originally weren't quite sure what that was supposed to look like.

Once we got a couple of establishes, they just kept rolling. It was not an experience that I'm used to on these kinds of films because usually there are so many shots or environments that are these giant undertakings for really not a lot of screen time or shot count. We were fortunate that we had a lot of these sequences where, once we nailed the look, it was just like, alright, now we've got a bunch of new things we got to do, we can make them all look great.