Perhaps youve heard of Prime Videos hit Emmy Award-winning series The Boys. Based on the comic book of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, the series, developed by Eric Kripke, who also serves as an executive producer, recently completed its fourth season, with a fifth upcoming in 2026. The Boys is many things: a brilliant subversion of the superhero genre, a biting political satire, a tour de force of action filmmaking, a pitch-dark comedy, and a veritable gorefest of bloody violence, in which multiple exploding heads are but so many grace notes.For Visual Effects Supervisor Stephan Fleet, who has been with the show from the beginning, the multi-faceted entity that is The Boys has proved to be an often challenging, always engaging, and truly educational experience. While his specific duties include the rendering of such notable phenomena as flying sheep and human combustion, its often the less flamboyant effects that require the most innovative and labor-intensive work.From the unexpectedly nuanced considerations that determine the appropriate volume of blood, to the visual and legal complications involved in the representation of screens onscreen, Fleet shared some of the central aesthetic and technical issues that inform his VFX stewardship. Dan Sarto: There's a wide range of visual effects that you produced for this show. Im guessing they included a lot of things that were visually vivid, but not necessarily the most challenging, and others that may not have stood out, but actually were labor intensive, or groundbreaking in some way. Can you talk a little about that?Stephan Fleet: In the biz, there's something called an amort or amortization budget and, for visual effects, that can mean effects that repeat over multiple episodes. Like lasering is a gag that we do over and over again, as well as blowing people up. And those types of things become easier. I'm not saying they dont pose their unique challenges, but they become more commonplace because you do them again and again. This is a show that does not actually have a lot of that. We tend to introduce a new superpower at least every couple episodes, if not every episode, and there are just some quirky things like flying sheep, for example, or carnivorous chickens.(Note: Killer Sheep VFX produced by Untold Studios)So, to answer your question, it's all hard to me. The hardest stuff is the stuff that has to look 100% real. When you do something like a flying sheep, there's always going to be a slight suspension of disbelief with an audience. Just because those don't really exist. However, cloning, or having a character be multiple versions of themselves in the same frame, was one of the hardest things we had to do this season. Audiences are really savvy in this day and age. I mean, influencers will make TikTok videos where they clone themselves, so people know how it's done. So now you have to do it in ways that make it harder; you have to do the impossible shots.For instance, the first time we see the cloning character, Splinter that shot took about 16 hours to do using motion control. It was about eight hours of rehearsal and setting up the cameras with dancers and a metronome. There's no face replacement. It's all the actor playing every single character with a moving camera moving over and over and over again. And the funny thing is, I've seen a few people watch that shot now during the course of the show, and no one really thinks about it. Everyone just sees six of the same guy, and no one actually goes, wow, that's a complicated visual effect. It's just so smoothly done that it looks like another piece of footage, but it took 16 hours to make. (Note: Splinter VFX produced by Pixomondo)Later on in the season, we have Erin Moriarty's character, Starlight, as a doppelganger of herself that she's fighting. That was another really complicated scene because, while she's just talking to herself in a room, she does things like grab a water bottle out of the other person's hand or she grabs her face and shakes it. So now you have contact between the two, and its a clever blend of face replacement and plates. And then, when she's fighting herself, that is her playing both sides of it, again to a metronome with heavy stunt choreography and a little bit of visual effects. So, these things that don't have a lot of blood or spectacle, but take a lot of visual effects, are by far the hardest thing to do.(Note: the Doppleganger VFX was produced by Pixomondo)Also, anyone who really pays attention knows that one of our motifs and one of our means of exposition in pushing the story forward is through people watching the media on monitors. All that stuff has to be heavily designed with motion graphics. Every bit of text on a TikTok has to be written out and vetted to make sure that it has the right timbre. And then on top of that, we're very particular with how the monitors look.DS: We just take it for granted when we see something like that on a show, because we all know what that looks like. But it's all very, very carefully created.SF: Yeah, we go to great lengths. I've developed a great appreciation for, and learned a lot about, just the legality of using things like TikTok and X/Twitter. There are ways to use this stuff for real, if you're using it in a certain way. We try and do that, but if we can't, we'll make our own thing that gives people an idea of what it is. We do our research and try to emulate a similar TikTok online what would the comments be in this day and age? So, in our world, it's mirroring some very real political things going on in the real world, but in a slightly Bizarro way. (Note: the Hard Push VFX produced by DNEG)DS: You mentioned that there are some effects, like blowing people up, that youve done many times and that have become commonplace. And there's always a little camp in it, a little dark humor. How do you arbitrate that? How do you determine what's too much or too cartoony? And have you arrived at a set way you do that, or is it a continual process of evaluation?SF: One of the joys in doing episodic work and seasons of things is that they have long lifespans. So, you do a season of something, and you learn from it. And so, some of the stuff that we did in Season 1 is picked up on by Eric and the writers, and then they actually write to it for Season 2. And then, in Season 2, something new comes along and I pick it up. You start building almost like a library. And then you also get feedback from audiences, and you get to lean into what audiences want. And so, you get this wonderful opportunity to do multiple seasons of this and build it up.We started doing a realistic amount of blood, and very quickly learned that that was not going to work. It wasn't legible. So, we just started pushing the blood more and more until it became almost this Jackson Pollock canvas of unrealistic blood. But the storytelling and the romance overtook the reality of the situation. And I realized at that moment that, while we are a show that touts itself as being grounded in many ways, blood is a conceit for us and a language that we use to tell the stories. It is one of those things in which we don't necessarily strive for realism. Ultimately, we've learned that people come to expect these heightened moments, and so we we're able to lean into it and have a little bit of liberty. (Note: face punch VFX produced by Untold Studios)DS: What would you say is the most important skill or skills that you've brought to this project? What has served you best as a visual effects supervisor?SF: That's a great and really deep question, actually. I went to theater school for undergrad and I went to film school for a master's degree. Doing this show specifically has been my PhD for how to make a show, not just visual effects. If I look back at Season 1 to now, and who I was as a person, I've become a very different person.I'm a passionate artist, I'm very good at what I do, and I think I have a good eye. But ultimately, I'm here to shepherd my team on the show fantastic artists and a multitude of vendors throughout the world to create this vision. And it's not something they really teach you in this industry. Unfortunately, when you first start growing and coming up and becoming a department head, there's no management school for visual effects supervision.When I first started doing this, out of a mixture of drive, a little bit of fear, and just a hunger to get it done, I could be a little angry or aggressive. And it's not that you're mad at other people, you're just trying to push the product forward, which can lead to this pressure cooker of insanity. And what I've learned as I've gone through is that other people have a lot of great ideas, and I love to listen to other people's ideas and bring them in and really build a team. It's not a kumbaya experience. It's a very professional experience, but it can be a professional experience that involves fun.I think one thing in visual effects that can be a problem is we can come in as the only department below the line that is responsible for stuff in post. You're on set with a lot of people that are not responsible for the outcome of that product in post-production. So that can make you very nervous. But if you go to another department and just give them an ultimatum or something, it just stresses them out more and doesnt solve a problem. But if you understand a little bit about what they're going through, you can come to the table and ask, how do we go through this together? There's so much that people don't understand about what goes into making the simplest of television shows, yet alone a complicated show like this. I would recommend that any visual effects supervisor, or aspiring visual effects supervisor, do their best to learn about and empathize with every other department and the people that they work with. Jon Hofferman is a freelance writer and editor based in Los Angeles. He is also the creator of the Classical Composers Poster, an educational and decorative music timeline chart that makes a wonderful gift.