CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER (2011) | Skinny Steve Rogers Featurette

[Applause] i think you can say about steve rogers character he's a hero before he takes the super soldier soon he's got courage he's got values he's got all the things that you want in a superhero he just doesn't have the size and the strength and once given that it makes for an awesome awesome superhero we knew that the movie wouldn't work if you didn't buy skinny steve at the top we're going to spend the whole first act with a scrawny version of steve rogers before he gets chosen for the program and undergoes the procedure that turns him into captain america and if that looked fake if that didn't feel right you would lose it entirely it's not about the transformation we thought very long and hard about how do you do the transformation in a way that hasn't been seen before and you think about needles and pads and steam and smoke and water and liquids and all this kind of like how do you do it and every time you think about all the movies that have done it before and so rather than it being about the transformation what we decided it was going gonna be more about establishing the character beforehand and then the transformation isn't the big deal i mean i mean there is it's a pretty big scene but it's sort of behind closed doors it's really about the man that goes into the pod and then the man that comes out of the pod and that's what the beat is in the movie as opposed to it being and now we see his muscles bulge and you know expand everything else knowing what we wanted chris to look like when he came out of the pod fully transformed we knew that he had to start working out right away and he spent probably three months getting into that shape we also knew that the entire first act of the film he had to look like he weighed 100 pounds and was 5'7 obviously once he started working out there's no going back [Music] steve rogers is supposed to be 98 pounds he's very tiny and then when he turns into captain america chris evans looks pretty remarkable with how he worked out and where he took his body to so that's a tough one that we've had to do a lot of reference shooting there's always a balance of trying to see okay what will work and what won't we sat down at the very beginning and we said well it's not really a visual effects movie is it yeah it's it's just a movie it's a movie it's a buddy pick and it's a superhero but he doesn't really have that many superpowers you know he jumps a bit he's stronger but it's not really many visual effects and then you turn around and we're probably going to be i don't know 12 13 1400 shots taking the original photography of chris evans thinning him down and just by frame by frame painstakingly reshaping his entire body for the first third of the movie we discussed all sorts of things are they different actors no well do you do a tom hanks castaway thing well our schedule wouldn't allow time for chris to get that skinny and bulk back up again so we started looking at a number of effects processes to get it done all cg came up we just didn't feel it was there it wasn't right and there was enough of that creepy factor that you would never be able to fall in love with it and the goal was to make the audience fall in love with the character before he gets any muscles before he puts on the costume before he holds the shield and in early meetings we had with with chris evans it was very important to him and it was important to us that it be him that it be his performance that entire section of the film i think if you get to know who steve rogers is before he becomes captain america that's what will make for a good character that's what will make a good movie we wanted chris evans and stanley tucci together we wanted chris and haley together we needed chris and tommy jones together and that's why the performance works [Music] so we're taking chris's performance and we're actually shrinking him down and scaling him down and thinning him up and we're doing it using a variety of techniques but that's one of our sort of most more challenging aspects of what we're doing and something that really hasn't been done to this level before you know he's a big guy he's broad and he's got a classic v-shape and what we're trying to turn him into is the 98 pound weakling and make him shorter and thin out his face and you know remove the muscles from his neck and his shoulders we did a few proof concept tests and i remember showing a section of the film early rough cut footage of the rebirth scene where there are a few shots of chris skinny gets onto a table goes into the pod the pot opens up reveals the muscles and the people i was showing to how did you have those muscles that was amazing how what's that effect how'd you have those muscles and i went that's not the effect the effect is the skinny version they go really that is kind of when we all look to each other when it's gonna work it changes the performance when you look when we're first looking at dailies and we're first looking at the rough cut there's very few completed shots and you see chris you know muscular chris doing these scenes with people and everyone's referring to me you don't give up you're skinny and then when he starts seeing the effect shots finally in the film wow does it change everything as much as possible his chris basically shrunk when that didn't work for technical reasons we photographed a body double what we call a skinny steve english guy named leander dini chris is of a kind of heroic build and he needs to be a scrawny loser that's where i come in he'll decide how he wants to do the scene and i'll watch him do it four or five times and then i do that and try and get an exact copy okay good you do one with chris you do one with a double you do one with a clean plate sometimes we do one with chris and slide a green screen in behind them sometimes we do one with the double and put tracking markers on his face frankly because we wanted to give the the effects houses as much information as they needed because we knew the process wouldn't be easy and we knew that from shot to shot they'd have to vary their technique so we essentially covered every technique possible to give them all the ammunition they need what we found out early on is that leander wasn't quite thin enough and weak looking enough and he wasn't quite emaciated to the point we wanted to so we would have to skin leander as well and sometimes when we skinny leander chris's head would be wrong it's amazing how just a matter of millimeters will make him look like a completely different person it's been probably the hardest thing for us to achieve because not only are you trying to make someone look small and you're trying to make him look believable but you're also trying to make him look consistent and from shot to shot depending on the lens that you used when you're photographed or the lighting that can change things dramatically and because there's so many shots it's not like we can give them to one artist and say you know make all these shots look like the same guy they have to go to several different artists we employ eight or nine companies currently and we've got them in three continents and some of those companies will have upwards of three four hundred people working on this there's a lot of work and a lot of incredible amount of energy and effort goes into every single frame in the final movie you know you really are concentrating on every single pixel so they're they're constantly comparing notes and trying to make them look like the same person so if the lighting is different the angle is different and the the weather is different it changes just enough so that suddenly you shrink him down and it's it's not the same guy here we have an example of of him where we've actually just literally taken his whole face and his body his shoulders his neck and we've just thinned him down we've made his cheeks more gaunt we've changed the shape of his jaw to remove some of that strong sort of superhero jaw we've made his shoulders much much narrower and given him more of a coat hanger feel here in this area here in that is neck we've just tried to make the the helmet look just a little bit big we've shrunk the whole head just a little bit and made him just a little bit smaller what we're not doing is just a general overall scale down so it literally is taking the sides of his of his features and moving them all in but making sure that the central features the face stays the same so what you're seeing is still chris evans and you can you can see that you know it's still the same person but it's really trying to try and maintain that character of what steve is we are going to win this war because we have the best men and because they are going to get better much better on this shot here we're actually doing our a different technique which is to do which is is to use our body double this is what we how we actually photographed him he's got green dots with his face so that we could track where his face was looking because we looked at this and thought well this is likely to be more of a head replacement technique rather than skip slimming crisp down so we shot the same pass with chris evans face or chris walking doing the same motion exactly the same so we shot the scene two different ways and then we took chris's head and we placed chris's head onto the leander body you're beginning to believe that you know it's chris is chris walking towards us but it's a very very small version of chris you still recognize that is chris evans and yet is unfathomable that just half the man that he really ends up being in the movie visual effects really have to be on point if they look silly the illusion is shattered but you really feel like it's me it's kind of interesting how visual effects touches so many different aspects of filmmaking nowadays and there's so much that we can do just as maybe you start to think you see what the trick is in the next shot it's a different trick so you can't quite grasp it so it must be real it's pretty original and pretty fantastic [Music] to the little guys hey lisa here with more on chris evans now for his directorial debut before we go evans also played the lead role he wanted to learn how to play the trumpet as his character does in the film however he found the process so difficult that he resigned himself to memorizing where to put his fingers to play the different notes without actually playing the instrument hmm there you go now do you like my shirt you can get one for yourself in the link in the description

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Keywords: Captain America, Skinny Steve Rogers, Featurette, Captain America Featurette, Captain America Skinny Steve Rogers, movie extra, making of Documentary, making of featurette, movie featurette, 2011 movie, marvel movie, Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Samuel L. Jackson, Hayley Atwell, Sebastian Stan, Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter, MCU, Red Skull, Bucky, nazi, WWII, FilmIsNow Extra

Id: R96P_rkwN2s

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021