Critical Role actors break down Vox Machina’s epic season 2 finale

Critical Role’s Legend of Vox Machina season 2 has officially wrapped on Prime Video, and the finale’s big fight already stands out as one of the animated series’ best. Season 2 focused on the overarching threat of the Chroma Conclave, a group of dragons who threaten Tal’Dorei, and Vox Machina, and the final confrontation spans the final two episodes, from the moment Percy springs a trap to snare Umbrasyl in “In the Belly of the Beast” and the moment Umbrasyl falls in “The Hope Devourer.”

From the animators to the cast themselves, everyone we spoke to was excited about what the season finale meant, and how it paid off the monumental task of bringing the moment — and its CG dragon — to life. The battle against Umbrasyl represented seven years worth of storytelling. Here’s how it happened.

We plan at dawn

Image: Crucial

There was no internet before there was Legend of Vox MachinaThere was Important RoleA series of actual-play videos led by a team of voice actors who love games. Episodes 55 (“Umbrasyl”) to 56 (“Hope”) of Important Role’s first campaign played out in real time over nearly six hours, taking the band of adventurers known as Vox Machina from the town of Westruun through the sky, all the way to the bowels of Gatshadow, where the crew wages an increasingly desperate fight against Umbrasyl. What the actors and GM pulled off in the game in 2016 became the basis for the animated series’ epic two-episode final fight.

Liam O’Brien Co-founder, Critical Role; EP, actor (“Vax’ildan”), Legend of Vox Machina

I remember lots of planning, and it kind of went well until it didn’t that night.

Laura Bailey Co-founder, Critical Role; EP, actor (“Jester”), Legend of Vox Machina

That’s the usual. [laughs]

Liam O’Brien

However, we were able to do real good first. I mean, that’s where “At dawn, we plan” originated from.

Dani CarrCritical Role, Lorekeeper

A full episode and a half of planning for this dragon fight before y’all finally faced him. Then another half-hour of fighting him.

Laura Bailey

The plan was multi-step.

Liam O’Brien

Multi-step plans of a plan.

Travis Willingham Chief Executive Officer, Critical Role; actor (“Grog”), Legend of Vox Machina

This was the moment I can remember when planning, or actually having any kind of strategy, made a huge difference. The reality was that even the best-planned plans can be ruined by a bad GM or a roll on the dice.

Dani Carr

For me this is a very interesting moment, particularly as lore keeper for Critical Role’s journey. I was home at the time these episodes were airing in 2016. I watched and enjoyed the show, and was tweeting with everyone else.

Travis Willingham

You must also remember that things get more terrible, and they become even more epic. So whether Sam and Liam thought it was a good idea to appear inside an ancient black dragon, or my buffoonish half-giant thought hanging from a chain behind it as it took off into the sky — we were both right and wrong at the same time.

Dani Carr

This is the dangling scenario that [Grog]Discover more [himself] in. I remember the whole time, just sitting on my bed, in my bedroom, like, “Oh god, what’s going to happen? They’re all gonna die.”

Matthew Mercer Chief Creative Office, Critical Role, actor (“Umbrasyl”), Legend of Vox Machina

It’s wild to go back to any of these encounters because we’re reminded of all these moments that grew fuzzy with time, all these wonderful little quips and character moments and epic successes. There are also terrifying and tragic failures of circumstances or dice rolls. Getting to pinpoint the moments that are even worth transitioning to the new medium, and which we can ever-so-faintly change, plus upping them a bit now that we’re not completely beholden to dice rolls and in-the-moment improvisation…

Laura Bailey

…without losing all of the absolutely absurd moments along the way.

Liam O’Brien

Keep the worst moments of your life.

Matthew Mercer

That’s kind of the secret spice in all this. Yeah, they’re heroes, and you’ve seen a lot of epic fantasy genre work through different mediums, but you know the best moments are the ones where things just go completely sideways in ridiculous and absurd ways. And then having characters acknowledge “this is absurd and ridiculous” in the midst of pushing forward. I think that’s what our game definitively continues to cling onto and kind of identify itself alongside when we play it. That was what we wanted to ensure that it carried over into the series.

Keep the worst moments of your life to the positive

Vox Machina’s story was given a fresh lease of life by a Critical Role Kickstarter that raised a record amount of money. The series found a home at Amazon Prime Video and became an instant hit in 2021, but production on season 2 was already well underway — start to finish, the process for a single episode can take six to eight months of work. Even more critical was the decision of where to stop, and where to go.

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Sam Riegel Co-founder, Critical Role; EP, actor (“Scanlan”), Legend of Vox Machina

This series’ biggest challenge was how to preserve the spontaneity of the ideas we share at the table, and then translate that into a narrative. Some of that has meant taking the “feeling” of a big moment — like slaying Umbrasyl, or teleporting inside a dragon belly — and shifting the details slightly so that it feels the same, just as epic and satisfying, but it’s still surprising to both us and the audience. The actual performance was not as good, but it is still a great experience.

Matthew Mercer

Many people who’ve played various tabletop role-playing games know that these battles can sometimes take a while [laughs]It can be done over a longer period. Here we can ramp up the speed, or ramp up the intensity, and have it build toward a climax that’s satisfying for the viewers and the main characters of the story.

Umbrasyl was canonically considered the first dragon who fell. So [ending on the battle]This was an amalgamation of what you would consider a good ending point to the season and where you will be able to start to see it. [victory]this dumb bunch of people. They also demonstrate that they are not at a disadvantage in the eyes of others and the global scale of events.

Travis Willingham

For a variety of reasons we’ve had to find creative ways to streamline, remove or solve certain elements or features from how the story unfolded in our livestream. We’re also always very conscious of trying to maintain a perspective on the abilities and powers of each character, so they don’t seem too OP [overpowered]It is too rapid.

Matthew Mercer

There were several weeks of meetings to establish the overall arc and to discuss the details of the season with those who are involved in bringing it to life.

Travis Willingham

We loved Scanlan and Vax finding their way inside the dragon, but without a spell to put them there… There was an unforgettable moment on our writers call when the idea of a “rear entry” plan was first tossed out. The laughter and tears quickly turned to anger, but we soon realized that we needed to act on the suggestion.

Liam O’Brien

If you want the version without the butt, that’s out there for you. With the game, there’s so many harebrained ideas and so many magic items and so many spells, and they’re great at the table, there’s just not enough room for every spell and every magical item.

Laura Bailey

Didn’t you Dimension Door in?

Liam O’Brien

Dimension Door and all the heroes needed to be equal in size. Also, we reduced Vax. Scanlan was able to Dimension Door both Vax and the tiny Vax. So, that’s wild and awesome and I still love it. But on our fastly chugging adventure train in the series, that’s a lot to explain and justify in a hurry. The team was trying to figure out a faster way. It was actually my idea to go up the butt. It’s just one of those things, we do it all the time at our company, where someone just goes, Wait a minute, this is dumb… What if? And then that’s what we do. It’s kind of our hallmark now.

Sung Jin AhnTitmouse Inc. Supervising Director

There is a fun little juxtaposition in animation where we have to use our imagination and pretend — How would an engineer do this? — something that we have no real-life background in, to make believable imagery.

Phil Bourassa The Lead Character Design Legend of Vox Machina

It’s that thing of knowing when you can cheat and when you have to be like one-to-one or literal. And there’s always a degree of liberties that you can take.

Sung Jin Ahn

You are now ready to go. [Percy’s] trap, which was really thought-through, and then you’ve got the characters going up Umbrasyl’s rear end, which anatomically does not make sense. None. We’ve had many discussions about dragon buttholes. Professionally, mind you, they’re all professional.

Phil Bourassa

You can see the scales go in the stomach, then the digestive system, but does it actually work? It’s probably not. Like there’s probably not enough room for all that, even though Umbrasyl is very big and stuff. But as long as it tracks and it reads and there’s a suspension of disbelief, it seems plausible.

Arthur Loftis Titmouse Inc./Art DirectorLegend of Vox Machina

It all ties back to its tabletop roots, as Matt worked tirelessly creating a realistic and grounded fantasy world. Everything is self-serious, so that the ecosystem can function well. When you throw his players in it, they ruin it with their witty jokes. That’s the fun of the original show that we keep alive.

Sung Jin Ahn

You’re telling me we worked so hard and that’s not even canonical!?

Phil Bourassa

It’s canonical now, baby.

Arthur Loftis

We made a canon.

Matthew Mercer

You can find similarities between stories that are separated by hundreds of hours. They may feel different when placed within a smaller timeline. For example, Umbrasyl was defeated in Umbrasyl’s lair. It was a dark cavern at the top of the mountain with many holes. [but]When we first started talking about it, it was hard to distinguish it from the fight with Brimscythe that took place in season 1.

Sung Jin Ahn

According to legend, sphinxes and dragons enjoy fighting in caves. Brimscythe’s battle with Vox Machina in season 1 was in this cold, tundra-like cavern with mounds of gold and sky lighting from above. In the Umbrasyl battle [episode]It is located in a dark, closed cave filled with acid pools. These few words gave us many ideas and ways to visually change the tone.

Matthew Mercer

We made the surface even porier, creating a multi-tunnel cave between the cleft and a chasm at the top of the mountain. This allowed us to play with our design team about the potential dangers and pools of acid.

Arthur Loftis

The color scripting this season helped out a lot, because we didn’t do a lot of that in season 1. Howard Chen was our dedicated season 2 color script painter. He would create the beautiful paintings you can see at the end of each episode. So he set up the lighting for each of these locations — seeing the Umbrasyl fight in the still images along the way really helped inform the rest of the team, like, Okay, so this is how large the cave should be. This is the place where the acid can get the perfect amount of bounce..

Image: Prime Video

Matthew Mercer

We wanted to share our thoughts on the situation and the environment in which it took place. [the characters]More movement opportunities, particularly since Vax just received a new mode of transport. Vex also received an aeroplane to transport him earlier in season. The ability to interact with flying and dragons, and other characters of similar speed is a bonus. [allows]It allows combat to be dynamic. It is very similar to what happened in the campaign when the party fled from a dragon. Some people hold on to their lives until the end, even though it could be their final.

Vax sneaked in and we wanted it. [moment of]Inadvertently, you are surrounded by an unknown predator.

Liam O’Brien

In the game, we constantly step on rakes.

Matthew Mercer

I have a blast putting down rakes to allow you guys to take them on.

Dani Carr

It’s important to me to have the consistency of the character arcs, and see where someone starts at point A, and get them to point Z, and if the other letters shift around you still hit those main beats. The things that you enjoy about each character are still there, as well as how they relate to others.

Laura Bailey

The relationship is a good one. [between the twins]This is done over hundreds of hours so we can see every detail in the development of the relationship. And when we’ve condensed it [in “The Hope Devourer”] it’s nice to see their trust and their doubt in each other playing out.

Liam O’Brien

We did an excellent job with season 1, and I am very impressed by the level of cooperation between the twins. The twins have been friends for decades. It is not fun for them to have everything go smoothly. It’s the fun of making your characters a mess. They are adapting and finding other people to depend on is what I love.

Sam Riegel

It was about overcoming individual insecurities. How can you be part of a team if you’re still hung up on personal failings? So, [in the final fight] Scanlan needed a moment where the group could see him shine — to help him get over the assumption that he’s the tiniest, most useless member of Vox Machina. He still hasn’t gotten over it — but maybe this is a start.

Matthew Mercer

We want people new to the series to be able to follow the story and feel as invested as anyone else. But we also want our OG Critters to enjoy little surprises. And we can make alterations and changes to serve the quality of the overall story that we’re telling, but also to let them know, hey, maybe you don’t know everything that’s coming.

How to make your dragon

The Critical Role cast members were vehement about their appreciation of Umbrasyl’s slithery, “you can almost smell him just looking at him” design, even saying that he was their favorite dragon of the Chroma Conclave in terms of his final look. Viewers see the dragon in many different iterations — in the air, on the ground, and even invisible — and the effect pushed the limits of what even a seasoned animation house like Titmouse was ready to handle.

Sung Jin Ahn

When we were doing initial concepts, obviously it’s all based off of the personality that Matt described to us, but I remember that even from the very early inception, it all boiled down to the broad shape language and which shapes we thought conveyed each dragon’s personality. Umbrasyl has a variety of spindly, sharp shapes. If you look at Vorugal, he’s more like a big chunk of triangle.

Phil Bourassa

Christine Bian is the person I would like to thank. She was brought in to help us design the dragons as well as the sphinxes when we discovered that we already had the Chroma Conclave. Christine is not only just a brilliant designer, she’s one of the best creature designers in the business. She’s so adept with real animal anatomy, she’s brilliant at it, her stuff is so thoroughly researched.

Sung Jin Ahn

Arthur, you’re the one to really get your hands in. Let us know if there’s secret highlights or secret traumas you wanna share with us.

Arthur Loftis

This is the part that causes trauma. [laughs] We spent months on it, and Christine came up with some amazing options for the rough designs, and honestly her finished designs, they’re very well thought-up, they’ve got some great gimmicks, like the acid pustules on Umbrasyl’s wings, where every time he flaps acid comes off of [them].

Phil Bourassa

That was all she did in one sketch.

Arthur Loftis

After we listened to all her cool tidbits, we went into the dragons and manually textured each nook and corner. Laura Hohman (our lead surfacer) did most of the work and I was able to take my paintings and make them real.

Phil Bourassa

A village is required to make a dragon.

Arthur Loftis

There’s all the invisibility stuff. […]It almost seemed like there were three teams that had to work together in order to achieve this. It’s literally a CG dragon being animated and then turning invisible. To describe the way his body melts into his scales, there must be 2D animation added to it. It’s really difficult to do that in 2D, and we’re combining 2D and 3D and then working hand-in-hand with the comp team to develop a look by putting all those pieces together.

Sung Jin Ahn

There are definitely easier routes we could have taken — like literally taking the opacity bar and scaling it down in our shots. […] We really want to push this show, in terms of it being an animated show, and make something unique that hasn’t been done before. It’s all in the small things.

Phil Bourassa

Attention to detail is important and it’s something that everyone should pay attention to. It’s like Sung Jin said, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because of that. Every detail is taken with great care. You’re always looking for the economical solution in animation, but we don’t do it at the expense of quality and creativity.

Sung Jin Ahn

Here’s a little behind-the-scenes fact that you only see in those DVD box sets: Midway through the production we would see early footage of the dragons back, and we saw them and both on our end and with feedback from other creative team members, we had to overhaul their look in the middle of the show. They look amazing. This was not something that was planned. It was an ongoing process.

Arthur Loftis

I do remember our technical director, Eddie Gonzalez, he’s been on since season 1. […]He admitted that he had been putting too much pressure on himself. It looks great in 2D. He did not want 3D to feel like the weakest of the group. He was so happy. I’m gonna throw myself at this and really make sure you feel the weight of these wings pushing these massive creatures off the ground. Yeah, frankly, like a lot of animated shows with dragons in ’em, they don’t come close to the amount of realism that we put into those models.

Sung Jin Ahn

Arthur Loftis is bold and brazen.

Arthur Loftis

Please fight me. [laughs]

Vox in the Machina

The Cast of Important Role, all voice-over actors, recorded most of the second season’s voice-over in their homes, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. But there was still room for improvisation, whether that came about from hearing other cast members’ takes or Sam Riegel’s improvised dragon-slaying sound.

Matthew Mercer

It’s messy, being the voice of a swamp dragon. It’s not uncommon for me to have to wipe off the iPad where I had written my script. When you’re in that space, especially when you want to have that sort of thickness to the texture, it helps to like, drink a little milk beforehand and get that thickness, that viscosity in the throat. [laughs] I know, it’s nasty, but it works! You end up having that sort of Jackson Pollock across the screen when you’re done.

Laura Bailey

We’ve all heard each other do so many different voices, especially with as much game as we’ve played together, but hearing these voices with headphones on as we’re recording… Matt will do some stuff, and I just wanna pull the headphones off of my ears because it’s just, it fills your whole brain with that milky sound. [gags] It’s really impressive.

Matthew Mercer

You’re welcome. Laura.

Liam O’Brien

You might also find it interesting. [Matt]Recently, we were greeted with an uncontrollable scream that came with no warning. It basically sent the whole cast of actors through the roof.

Matthew Mercer

We would schedule people to record with us remotely, but there were a few scenes that depended on how intense or dynamic the scene was. We wanted to play off each other while still bringing as much in-person recording quality together. Laura stated that the majority of the recording was done in our different closets and homes, trying to get it all recorded on time, considering the bizarre circumstances we had to endure.

Liam O’Brien

Yeah, and a different process, cause when you’re doing a group read all together, you get to see and hear the magic of everybody all at once. I would hear a lot of Laura’s lines, because the twins would get paired. Then, everything would surprise me many months later.

Laura Bailey

We’d get the episode for pickups and we record our pickups separately during the pandemic. Just to see what everyone was up to, I’d go through every episode.

Matthew Mercer

On one hand, I think us having come up through dubbing in video games, which is a very solitary recording experience, we know you can’t rely on other performances. You just have to make your choices and go — it definitely helped given the challenging circumstances. It also helps that we’ve lived these characters and these stories for years and we hold them so dearly. These characters are a part of our lives, so it’s easy to fall into them when working alone. But then, to Laura’s point, you come back and you get the line cut before the pickups everyone’s put in there and you’re like, Oh man, everyone’s so good. Okay. I’m just gonna throw on a couple ones you didn’t ask for. ’Cause I wanna plus it up to match their level. We’re all just making each other be our best selves as best we can.

Laura Bailey

We’re all perfectionists as well, so we get way more pickups than we probably should.

Sam Riegel

We can keep recording dialogue right up until the day of the mix, and a lot of other shows can’t do that.

Travis Willingham

Everybody has more than a handful of improv reads. These are either the first records, or when storyboards/animatics return. We’re not precious with our scripts, since it’s us adapting our own stuff in the first place — so anything that’s added by the cast, or any of our talented guest cast, is always up for consideration. We’re big fans of “best idea wins.”

Liam O’Brien

Ah, yes! [the note Scanlan sings as the battle ends]It was spontaneously improvised.

Laura Bailey

Sam will sometimes just sing stuff, and it’s epic.

Matthew Mercer

Scanlan’s no different in his random reactions and occasional bits of song. I mean, there’s quite a few clips here and there throughout the series that weren’t in the script, that were just improvised in the moment. We’re like, Well, I mean, that’s the character. This is what stays in.

Dragons — and laurels — all the way down

The creators and animators of animated series have much to do with the new season. Bringing the final product of the finale’s battle together means years of work coming to fruition — and working hard to ensure that the rest of the series can flow from the moment, especially with season three well underway.

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Laura Bailey

There’s not really a break, once one season [ends] it’s not like season two gets done and then we are off for a while and then we start on season three. The animation begins after season two is finished. And then by the time we’re doing like our final pickups before audio is locked, before the episode is locked, we’re already recording on season three. So that’s overlapping there. It’s like a train that’s just, it’s going, full steam now.

Matthew Mercer

We’re just on the front, screaming. [laughs] Excitedly.

Liam O’Brien

It’s different from our history, which is just getting hired as an actor to come in and you’re there for four hours max to do something. And now we get the joy and the challenge of birthing episodes over all those months, and every day you’re working on some different aspect in the process. I just wouldn’t change it for the world.

Matthew Mercer

I’m so used to creating a lot of this stuff on my own, just alone in my office and going, “I hope it’s okay. I hope people like it.”The ability to create animations with the help of other talented people is a great feeling. “Ooh, what if we did this? Oh, how can we plus this?”And that’s it. [we]You can make an already unique thing even better and a collaboration that is ever evolving.

Liam O’Brien

Everyone who works on the show in some capacity is a fan. It is evident in every frame.

Laura Bailey

I love going and watching the episodes over and over, and then just watching every character in the background, cause they’re doing so much, and all the little expressions that you miss on the first time through. It’s wonderful.

Dani Carr

That’s my favorite thing to do on rewatches — pick somebody and just watch them the whole time.

Matthew Mercer

You know that it’s a challenging scale to produce animation like this and there’s always a part in the back of my head that’s like, It is my hope that those who work on it enjoy it as much and as much as I do. There’s always that little fear back there, and every opportunity we’ve had to meet the teams and spend time with them and hang out and celebrate, everyone has been as excited and grateful to be on this as we are. This to me, is a very special thing. That kind of close-to-universal camaraderie, passion is truly amazing.

Arthur Loftis

When it was airing, I saw the advertisement. And I mean, I think to me, we’re living in an age of adaptations. […]Everything that exists already needs more. And so it’s not uncommon to work on stuff as a fan, but I think the weirdest part is that the people who are in charge of [this]All of them are as happy as us. […]This show is for everyone. I can’t believe they’re letting us do this. It was a tabletop game and now it’s this — I don’t know what it is. It’s this nerd fan dream-come-true fantasy, right?

Phil Bourassa

There’s something really rewarding and fulfilling about going directly to the source — and nobody knows it better, and nobody’s gonna be more enthusiastic about it. And that has a reciprocating effect, because we’re getting that kind of direct feedback from the people that know [the material]The best.

Sung Jin Ahn

Dragons are still difficult, you yo. Dragons still hard. [laughs] I know we’re all smiles and talking all fondly, but it’s hard making those dragons. This should be captured. This was difficult.

Phil Bourassa

It was tough. I’ll just say: One down, three to go.