Most producers don't realize that 60% of our work happens before we ever step on set. By the time cameras roll and something explodes or a rainstorm kicks in on cue, we've already spent weeks planning, building, testing, and arguing about safety margins. The on-set magic is the visible tip of a much larger operation.
We've been coordinating SFX at Dynamic Effects Collective in Toronto for over two decades — The Boys, Reacher, Pompeii, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Every show is different, but the process follows the same arc: prep, shoot, wrap. Here's what that actually looks like from inside the department.
Pre-Production: Where the Real Work Lives
It starts with the script breakdown. We read every scene looking for anything that involves a physical effect — pyrotechnics, weather, fire, mechanical rigs, breakaway materials, bullet hits, atmospherics. If the script says "the building explodes," that's our department. If it says "rain pours through a shattered window," also us. If a car flips through the air and the director wants it done for real, same thing.
Once we've flagged every effect, we sit down with the director and the first AD. A director might say they want a massive fireball, but what does "massive" mean? Six feet? Thirty feet? Repeatable for multiple takes? Near actors or in a wide with stunt doubles? Every answer changes the engineering, the budget, and the safety plan.
Budgeting an SFX package is part science, part experience. We price out materials — pyrotechnic charges, breakaway glass, rain heads, wind machines, hydraulic rigs, propane systems — and factor in labour, transport, and shop time. A single rain sequence can require a full day of rigging. A pyro gag might need custom-fabricated mortars and weeks of load testing. We give the production an honest number, and if it's too high, we talk about creative alternatives. There's almost always a way to get the shot.
Then comes R&D and testing — the part that separates a good SFX company from a dangerous one. On The Boys, we built atmospheric rigs that filled entire city-block sets with layered fog at different densities. On See, we engineered weather systems that could run driving rain for hours without soaking the camera department's gear. Every one of those gags got tested in our 50,000 square-foot shop before it went near a set. We weld, fabricate, paint, plumb, and wire everything in-house. If we can't test it, we won't run it.
Production: The Controlled Chaos
A typical shoot day for SFX starts hours before call time. We're on set early — rigging charges, running gas lines, setting up rain bars, pre-loading air mortars, wiring detonators. By the time the crew arrives for the safety meeting, our stuff is already in place and checked twice.
On any day involving pyrotechnics or mechanical effects, we run a separate SFX safety briefing on top of the standard crew meeting. We walk through exactly what's going to happen, where the blast zones are, and who has the kill switch. Nobody is surprised. That's the rule. On shows like The Boys and Gen V, where we're running squib hits and fire gags regularly, these briefings become second nature — but we never skip them and we never phone them in.
Here's something that catches a lot of first-time producers off guard: practical effects and visual effects aren't competitors. They're partners. We rig a real explosion on set — the concussive force, the fireball, the debris — and VFX enhances it later, adding a shockwave or extending the destruction digitally. The practical element gives actors something real to react to and gives the camera real light, real smoke, and real physics. No amount of CGI can replicate the way firelight dances across an actor's face.
Between setups, we're resetting. Breakaway walls get rebuilt. Squib rigs get reloaded. Rain systems get checked for pressure. On a heavy SFX day, we might reset the same gag four or five times. The AD wants to keep moving, but we won't cut corners on a reset. A half-loaded charge doesn't just ruin the take. It can hurt someone.
The Stuff Nobody Sees
There's a whole category of SFX work that audiences never think about because it's designed to be invisible. Atmospherics — haze, fog, steam, smoke — are on almost every set, every day. They give depth to the image and help the lighting department shape their work. Wind effects sell an exterior that's actually shot on a stage. Breakaway props let an actor punch through a door without getting cut. We ran effects like these across entire seasons of What We Do in the Shadows and Resident Evil — hundreds of invisible gags that the audience never notices, which is exactly the point.
Snow is a good example. Real snow melts under lights and won't match from take to take, so we make our own and rig it to fall naturally on cue. Same with rain. We don't wait for weather. We build it.
Wrap and What Comes After
When a show wraps, we don't just pack up and leave. Unexpended pyrotechnic charges get logged and disposed of according to federal explosives regulations. Rigs get disassembled, inspected, and stored. We maintain a fleet of trucks and trailers for transporting SFX equipment, and everything comes back to the shop in the same condition it went out.
We also do a post-mortem on every show. What worked? What would we do differently? On a show like Reacher, where we're running heavy pyro across multiple blocks of shooting, those lessons directly inform how we prep the next season. The companies that treat wrap as part of the process — not an afterthought — are the ones that keep getting called back.
If you're putting together a project in Toronto and the script has anything that burns, breaks, blows up, rains, snows, or moves on its own — that's where we come in. The SFX department exists to make the impossible look effortless and to make sure everyone goes home safe while we do it. That's the job.