The sequel to the 2021 reboot, Mortal Kombat II follows Earth's champions into an expanded confrontation with the forces of Outworld. Directed by Simon McQuoid and produced for Warner Bros., the film was shot in Queensland and takes the franchise's visual language to a larger scale, with an expanded roster of fighters and environments reaching well beyond anything in the first film.
Future Associate's contribution came in two distinct phases. The first was approximately 100 post-viz shots on the Blue Portal sequence, bridging the stunt team's pre-viz with the editorial cut. The second was a package of finishing VFX shots across Jade's interior sequence, Netherworld environments, and atmospheric and cleanup work through the film's final act.
/ Post-Viz — The Blue Portal Sequence
The first body of work Future Associate delivered on the show was post-viz for the Blue Portal sequence, roughly 100 shots in total. The sequence is set inside a manufactured fighting environment, and production had built a partial LED screen behind the gate to give the combatants something to react to on the day. It wasn't a full 360-degree surround: just a screen facing the camera direction, covering the front of the action.
When the edit cut to the characters from different angles, the background needed to be everywhere. Our job was to extend that partial LED environment out to cover all angles, so that wherever the camera pointed, the blue portal world wrapped around the fighters convincingly. That meant set extension across the full 360 degrees, adjustments to the fencing and ground around the sets, and harness removal across the sequence: a lot of the fighting and stunt work was rigged on cables, and those rigs needed to be gone.
We also used EmberGen to build flaming kicks and punch effects through the sequence. Framestore handled the final finishing shots, but our post-viz gave the editorial and finishing team a fully resolved version of the sequence to work from. Timing, animation, environment extension, effects: all locked before the final shots went to VFX for pixel-accurate finishing. Our post-viz was referenced by the finishing team throughout that process.
/ Kung Lao's Razor Hat
Kung Lao's razor hat is a central prop in the Blue Portal sequence: it's thrown, it travels across the environment, it comes back just as a fighter jumps and flips, and at one point it goes off into the portal space entirely. The hat's position at any given frame directly affects the timing of the stunts built around it. The stunt team had done their own pre-viz pass to map out its intended movement, but that pass was built around their own choreographic logic, not around the editorial cut.
Our task was to bridge the gap. We took the stunt team's intent, placed it in the context of the edit, and delivered a post-viz animation of the hat that worked shot by shot across the sequence. The coverage runs across wide birds-eye shots of Kung Lao and Liu Kang fighting, close-up shots of the hat in flight, camera whips and tilts tracking the razor as it moves, and eventually Kung Lao catching it and putting it back on. Getting the hat's continuity to carry through the cut, including its arc into the portal, was a core part of the creative and timing challenge on the Blue Portal sequence as a whole.
This kind of work reflects a broader shift in how high-end stunt teams now operate. The top stunt coordinators will often have someone in their team who can build a rough VFX pass, which lets them plan the physical performance around the CG element's trajectory. The gap between what the stunt viz produces and what the edit and VFX finishing needs is exactly where post-viz sits, and it's exactly what we were doing here.
/ The Red Throne Room — Set Reconstruction
Our most complex finishing work on the show was the Red Throne Room sequence: a Jade-centred interior with a layered production history. The majority of it was shot in Queensland during the main unit, but pickup shots were later added in Sydney after the Queensland set had been struck. For the pickups, Jade was placed on bluescreen with no practical set behind her.
RSP had built the environment for the sequence and supplied their asset to us. The geometry was solid, but the angles that came up in the Sydney pickups weren't fully covered by RSP's existing texture work. We extended those textures to cover the new camera positions, adjusted the look for our pipeline, and developed the red and blue lighting theme that runs through the interior across all the different shooting conditions.
The lighting challenge was significant. The sequence has a heavily stylised palette: deep reds, dramatic contrast, a look that reads as Outworld and not as a real-world location. Making shots from the Queensland main unit, the Sydney bluescreen pickup, and the RSP environment all read as the same scene required careful colour and grading work across every component. We supplied mattes to the grading team so they could adjust each layer independently and hold the look consistent through the final grade.
Running through the same sequence is a fight between Johnny Cage and Kano against Bi-Han and his shadow. The Bi-Han shadow effect was a CG double that materialises behind characters and needed to integrate convincingly with the live-action plates. Several shots also required a kunai element on bluescreen, and one required painting Bi-Han out of the frame at the start of the shot to hold the editorial structure of the sequence.
/ Jade's Staff — and the Tarkatan Work
Jade's staff was shot on set as a practical light prop. In the finished film it reads as a glowing CG weapon with a streaking trail effect. We replaced the practical light prop with a fully CG staff, matched it through the edit, and added the streaking element that gives it its characteristic motion trail. A separate version of the staff appears in the Tarkatan sequence: here it reads as deactivated, a plain emerald staff without a glow, and was also fully CG.
The staff fracture sequence culminates in the staff being smashed apart at high speed, with a skull face visible inside as it rotates toward the camera. The director had a specific vision for how the fracture should read: the skull had to be a certain size, rotating in a certain direction, catching the camera at a specific moment. Physically accurate simulations gave us a useful starting point, but the physics alone couldn't reliably produce the exact fracture behaviour the shot needed.
Our solution was a directed fracture: we ran the simulation to get the structural collapse, then took over the hero skull piece directly and animated it to hit the director's precise brief. The result is a shot that reads as physically real but delivers a moment the simulation alone couldn't guarantee. The editorial had also supplied a heavy retime on the staff action, which we worked within throughout.
The Tarkatan interior sequence brought a different kind of challenge. Baraka's prosthetic makeup was applied on set, but the prosthetic teeth and lip extensions needed to be removed in post for specific shots, leaving just the character's natural face within the monster design. That cleanup ran across dozens of shots. Raiden's eye effect also appeared through this sequence: a CG element replacing the character's eye in close-up, tracked across the performance. Interactive lightning effects tied it together, applied as a tint across the lighting in specific shots where the practical environment had no corresponding source.
/ Netherworld & Environment Work
Several shots across the show placed characters inside the Netherworld, a vast exterior environment built by Framestore. Our role in these shots was integration: taking rendered environment elements from Framestore, matching them to the plates, and compositing characters into specific positions within the space. In a show of this scale, it's common for a sequence to run across multiple vendors simultaneously, and these shots were a direct example of that workflow.
One sequence required Bi-Han to disappear from frame using an amulet: a contained effect, but one that needed to read as deliberate and stylised rather than a simple dissolve. We also built portal FX and fire FX through this section, along with blood elements for specific action moments.
We also handled a matte painting extension shot placing a character in a rocky exterior, and a village sequence where a DMP originally produced by Framestore needed augmentation. The director wanted the Tarkatan village to read as more compact: we tightened the layout, added roads through the settlement, and built lightning effects for the moment a character appears from above. Several shots in this sequence required Baraka to be fully removed from frame, with the environment reconstructed behind him. There's also a Johnny Cage gag in the village sequence that required specific comp work to land correctly per the editorial reference.
The same lightning approach carried through to a final campfire sequence, where there was no practical fire on set. Lights had been placed to suggest firelight; we added atmosphere, smoke, flame and lightning to complete the environment around the characters.