By TREVOR HOGGImages courtesy of HBO.Colin Farrell felt that prosthetic makeup designed by Mike Marino allowed him to express a sense of tragic wrath for Oswald Oz Cobb.A secondary villain who was the object of an explosive highway pursuit by the Batmobile gets his own Max limited series to bridge the narrative gap between The Batman and its upcoming sequel directed by Matt Reeves. The Penguin consists of eight episodes executive produced by Reeves, Dylan Clark and Lauren LeFranc, who also serves as the showrunner.Colin Farrell dons the prosthetic makeup and body suit again as an aspiring crime lord nicknamed after an aquatic flightless bird with a distinct waddle. Its great to be in the Batman universe and in the version of Gotham City that Matt Reeves created, states Lauren LeFranc, Executive Producer and Showrunner. It felt real, less comic book and more crime drama. We took that and ran with it. The film always takes place at night because its the Batman and hes not a guy who comes out in the day. But Oswald Oz Cobb does. We tried to embrace that aesthetic, but we were more handheld in how we shot. I always say that Batman is up high looking down on Gotham City. Oz is the guy whos down in the streets in the muck of the city looking up wanting to rise to power; that allows for us to enter seedier worlds in our show. The French Connection and Taxi Driver were parallels that we talked about a lot. Batman moves and thinks methodically while Oz is unpredictable in his actions, so we tried to have the camerawork and feel of our show mirror more who Oz is rather than Batman.Complicating the daily prosthetic makeup process for Mike Marino was having to flatten, cover and integrate the real hair of Colin Farrell.Contributing to the difficulty of the production was having lead actor Colin Farrell go from having to transform into his character 30 times for the feature film to 100 times for the limited series. Ive seen every single frame of this show, have been on set and watched this from every angle, LeFranc notes. Colin Farrell can be an actor, as he normally is, with his own face. Oz is a man to me. I know its Colin because I talk to him all of the time. But Mike Marino [The Penguin Prosthetic Makeup Designer] and Colin together created a completely new person. Crew members would come on set, especially when we first started shooting, and would stare at him because you kept looking for seams or something to understand how this was a mask and you couldnt find it. We have shots that are extremely close up, and the detail on Ozs face is incredible. Mike always wanted to challenge himself. I would write something and hed be, Keep writing like that because its so hard and I want to see what I can do. Oz is naked in the first episode. That is a full body prosthetic, which Mike and his team created. There are little specific hairs on his chest put in place with tweezers. The detail is remarkable. The Oscar-nominated actor never felt that his performance was impeded. Thats the alchemy of what Mike Marino does, observes Colin Farrell, who plays Oswald Cobb. The mix of what I was doing beneath the makeup and the kind of sense of tragic wrath that Oz carries himself through the world with, it just seemed to work. I was somewhere in there, but the face just moved beautifully. It may be a bit idealistic, but I do think if everyone approaches their work from a place of integrity and purity, and wants to do best by the project and understands youre a significant spoke of the project being born to life, then things do work out.Rather than peering down upon Gotham City, the perspective of the show is from the street level.Bridges, subways, underpasses and overpasses are a visual motif for The Penguin.Five body suits were in constant rotation. They get sweaty and have to be cleaned and dried then get the next one on, remarks Mike Marino. We tried to plan as much as we can based on experience, but you never know whats going to happen. There is so much movement and bubbles that form, and hes sweating, and the environment. We tried to keep him cool and tried to plan that youre going to stay in this tent that is hardcore air-conditioned; hes basically wearing a whole snowsuit every day. The nude suit was a one-off. Its blended at the wrists and ankles, and all of the hair that goes on. We didnt get to go through the finalizing process of the second suit because we got it all within one day and it maintained itself. The makeup process for the nude suit was even more laborious. We had pre-painted and pre-done a lot of hair, but the connection of it all had to be done on the day. Colin was in five or six hours of makeup, and the whole day was dedicated to that scene, which became its own entity. We see why he limps. There is a whole leg involved that is strange-looking. Colin is 95% covered in prosthetics during that nude reveal, Marino adds. Some digital augmentation was required. Im working with the visual effects team, personally circling and pointing out unavoidable errors. My eye is going to see things that they wont see because Im looking at where things begin and end that may seem seamless to someone else, he notes.The story takes place a couple of weeks after the flood, so the water has receded leaving behind mud and muck.Approximately 2,200 visual effects shots were created over a period of months for the eight episodes.Accenture Song VFX, Pixomondo, ReDefine, Stormborn Studios and Frost FX created approximately 2,200 visual effects shots over a six-month period. We developed an in-house asset library that was searchable and filterable, and shoehorned it into ShotGrid, reveals Visual Effects Supervisor Johnny Han. The vendors could peruse our assets, not just elements like sparks, glass, smoke and blood, but also cityscapes, sunrises, sunsets and looking at Manhattan in 100 different directions. We thought that was key to give the vendors the freedom to find what they thought was useful that perhaps I didnt even think would be necessary for shots. Various elements had to be recreated from The Batman, such as lens flares. I got on the phone with Dan Lemmon, the Visual Effects Supervisor on The Batman, and said, Tell me how you did this. He sent me this great document where he fleshed it all out. I went to the hardware store and bought all kinds of different silicone gels, hand sanitizers, soaps and anything we could stick onto the glass of the matte box of the ALEXA LF camera to smear different patterns. I also bought a bunch of different flashlights, LED and incandescent, to get wet caustic lens flares by shining them through the silicone gel smeared onto the glass in front of the camera. We got some amazing material that we felt even expanded upon what Wt FX had done in the film because we have a larger variety of scenes, Han says.The first shot after the prologue in Episode 101 was digitally altered after it was captured to achieve the desired thematic effect. Han describes, Were beginning way up above the ground looking at a classic Gotham skyline as if it was the same one from the film. But hold on; this is not where we are. Lets come down, and the camera starts descending through the rain, passing train tracks, and now coming into much smaller and rougher-looking buildings that have seen better days, all the way down to almost six inches off the ground. Literally, as low as you can get. Those same skyscrapers that we saw at the start of the shot are almost looking down at us from afar, like the rich looking down at a safe distance. Of course, a moment later, Ozs Maserati pulls right up to the nose of the camera. A different perspective was adopted for a flashback sequence in Episode 103 when the Riddler destroys the seawall causing a devastating flood. In The Batman, we were always far away from the water. We wanted to make this flood feel like Victor Aguilar was at ground zero. He saw the seawall break open, the water rush in and consume all of the cars and people on the street. And to make it a horrific and traumatic experience for him, which is a lot of the basis for his backstory of having lost everything. Conveying weight is always hard. We filled the water with chunks of debris from the concrete seawall and played that up, so the water itself ended up having this inky black depth to it, Han adds.Given the nature of the subject matter, a certain element was unavoidable. Its a show about gangsters who like to shoot guns often at night or in shadowy places, Han notes. The first week of shooting, we had a hero gunshot. I got an old camera flash and a sound trigger that sports photographers use, hooked them together, brought it on set and crossed my fingers. When the blank shot off, the bang of the trigger would sound-trigger the camera flash I had. It was this big Eureka! moment of an interactive light that we needed for the show. Visual effects still added a little muzzle flash cloud. We also obtained some technology to phase-synchronize the timing of the flashes with the rolling shutter of the camera so that it would never flash halfway through a frame. I felt from a visual effects perspective, it was a nice little visual stamp for the show, and we could take our gunfire to the next level. Atmospherics added a touch of life to shots. We were inserting birds, airplanes, helicopters, trains, cars and digital people to give the scene the right tone of life. We dont want it to feel too active. Its just that Gotham City itself is a living, breathing city, so there has to be some pulse to it at any given time. The Gotham City envisioned by Matt Reeves had to be honored. Part of the formula was Gothic architecture and skyscrapers. You might call it Neo-Gothic, where you have buildings that look like they have cathedrals on top of them.[Visual Effects Supervisor] Johnny Han and I are collaborating on creating some of the sets and translating them into VR sets and putting the Oculus goggles on our director Craig Zobel and have him walk through them.Kalina Ivanov, Production DesignerThe goal for the visual effects was to be invisible and provide the environmental scope required by the storytelling.A significant part of the digital set dressing was creating rubble and debris inspired by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.Blackgate Prison went through many iterations with inspiration coming from Eastern European correctional facilities.An asset library that was searchable and filterable was inserted into ShotGrid to assist visual effects companies in the creation of environments.Genre does not impact the design language. I find a character that I like and approach it from a character arc, reveals Production Designer Kalina Ivanov. I dont connect with Batman, but I get the Penguin. I get him with a chip on his shoulder for being poor and wanting to become rich. For me, everything that informs the design is that character: what hes about, his angst and his emotional journey. I design from an emotional state. The Penguin occurs a couple of weeks after the flood. Ivanov explains, The story takes place in locations where the water has receded, so what youre left with is the mud and muck. Thats where Katrina helped because the scale of that disaster was so huge and the way it pushed things around and the way cars were pushed into each other by the water and created these structures of three cars on top of each other. The special effects team created rigged cars to be like that. Because FEMA had started to clean up, we were also showing the dumpsters where people were throwing stuff, but what we needed to create was mud. Blackgate Prison went through many iterations. Ivanov recalls, I did this black-and-white sketch of a prison embedded into a rock formation, playing with the idea that its the Palisades across from Manhattan. Matt and Lauren thought the design was terrific but not grounded enough in reality. They encouraged me to go and look at more real prisons. It was the time that I realized theyre not approaching this as a comic book. I looked at some Eastern European prisons and Brutalism. There is an idea that Im going after, but its not vertical. Its horizontal. And its on an island. I looked at prisons on islands. I started creating it from there.Ivanov loves collaborating with visual effects. Johnny Han and I had a great relationship from the beginning. We are collaborating on creating some of the sets and translating them into VR sets and putting the Oculus goggles on our director Craig Zobel and have him walk through them, Ivanov states. I find that to be useful. We all agreed that in a show where you want the characters to feel like real people, you want to create as much around them for real and have fewer visual effects, [digitally] extend from there and [lean on visual effects] for the things you couldnt create, like the prison.Originally, the project was daunting. I thought I was supposed to follow the film, which was scary, to be honest. Its an eight-part series, not a two-hour film. It became clear that Matt, Dylan and Lauren were not looking to duplicate the film but capture the spirit of it. There was another reason we couldnt duplicate the film. The film was shot in England, and we were shooting in New York. The whole motif of The French Connection and shooting under tracks, subways and passages came from that original discussion. It became a theme, Ivanov says. Singling out an environment is not easy. Truly there are so many wonderful sets in this show, and theyre all my children, she acknowledges. Its hard for me to play my favorites. The Penguin is so rich for a designer. Its a true visual gift.