How Avengers: Endgame's Visual Effects Were Made | WIRED

where the anger [Music] [Music] my name is Jen underdahl and I was the visual effects producer on Marvel's endgame my main tasks are to work with our directors John Anthony and our studio heads to make sure that the vendors we are bringing on board are the right vendors for the the scope of work that we have for the show I have to look at these two movies as a single project it Stannis's movie infinity ward's so in 2016 we knew that very early on we were going to need to test this before we even shot a frame of footage to give some sort of ease and peace of mind to our filmmakers that yes this guy could carry 2/3 of them we worked with Josh's people in our production staff to bring him in and work with Joe and Anthony we did some very early testing and a mocap volume we had head cam setup he's got dots on his face and those two cameras are capturing his facial performance so we kind of did this this whole gauntlet yeah so gauntlet of testing and scanning capturing every aspect of Josh's face and in different range of motions so not only was it a technical discovery for us it was also a character discovery for Josh Joe and Anthony when we found we kind of had to imagine Panos being this big mean you know kind of over-the-top character but how Josh played it was beautiful his performance was was menacing but subtle terrifying him but in little flinches so we realized at that moment that we really needed to have a company that could capture all that and pull his performance through the prosthetics so that when you are like this on things you felt the terror in your bones with his character history you had [Music] traditional domain to Wed over key in thousands of development so we gave them all this scanning data we gave them all this footage and in the end a couple months later they turned around a version of panels that look crazy like Josh ideally in any situation when you have a digital character you want to have two actors acting to one another that's where the magic happens and we can replace it digitally but we certainly can't manufacture that performance so it's really important for us to put the actors in a situation where they are speaking to one another face-to-face eye-to-eye line to eye line now it gets complicated by the fact that phallus is 15 feet tall if josh is in movement for example fighting with anybody we put proxies on him we put like displacement suits that's so that if you have to touch him or interact with him in any way the opposing actors hands are in the correct position eyelines same thing we will oftentimes put a eyeline on a pole on a backpack he looks kind of silly on set but he's pretty awesome about it but oftentimes whatever we try as much as possible to get eyeline to eyeline maybe smashed a few things along the way I think it's good to hurt us but whatever so the whole goal was smart Hawk was to bring old Hulk together with dr. banner what was that gonna look like I put the brains and the Brawn together and now they give me best of both worlds borrowing from the 2d designs that came from Marvel we then had to sculpt smart Hulk into a 3d model you always want to have little anchor points in your digital characters where you see your actors features to some degree I mean everybody kind of fell in love with him actually when we started to see him come to life and the more we found we incorporated mark the more his performance also stayed true to the digital performance when I had to gauntlet the stones I really tried to bring her back ILM they had done Hulk from Avengers 1 so we knew that they already knew this character they knew his skin how to deal with this skin technically they knew his musculature inside and out so really blending him with a more humanoid proportioned character was the right way to go casting wise for for that character so we find that in visual effects the more we stay out of the way of the filmmakers and the actors the the better results we're gonna get the footage is what we derive all of our artistry from so when that is genuine when that is fluid when that is moving we really get the best of both worlds in a case like Smart Hulk you want to make sure that mark is interacting on set with all the other characters in the case of the Avengers compound he needs to be there with Tony he needs to be there with Natasha used to be in that scene so we'll set up a motion capture volume on set so he's surrounded by cameras and he's animo cap suit so again visual effects needs to really in all of our technical gathering we need to take a backseat to to what's happening all the Performing Arts have their own own sense okay I said so in the case of Captain America what would a Super Soldier look like if he had aged 106 years what would his skin look like so we did some development with that getting targets with our studio and our directors to say hey you know is this where we should be aiming once they bought off and what that look was gonna be we then started casting for skin double looking around for an old guy who approximates the same age and face shape of capital what cap would be who shot in the same lighting conditions right after Chris performs he gives the same lines he who tries to emulate Chris's performance as much as possible so that it doesn't take a whole lot of hammering when we go dink onto Chris's face in addition to the skin double you also need to give him sort of an older man's body older ends sort of overall profile so as you've seen with skinny Steve in Captain America one vola is able to take significant size off of Chris Evans pretty much in every instance on Captain America one where we're shooting Chris Evans it's Chris Evans that's his body and he's a big dude we need to get him down to a 90 pound weakling to do so Lola will do an overall warp on his body and literally squish him down so that he fits in the plate as this character they did the same sort of thing though not with as heavy a hand for old cap they took some neck off of him so he wasn't quite as as beefy here and who shrunk his shoulders and sort of his overall profile to give him that 106 year old the super-soldier look now we've got em game fair and game Thor has lost everything repeatedly so he has dealt with it by eating a lot and drinking a lot and playing video games of course so to get this character we fought really hard to make sure that we had a practical solution to this because we've seen it done before you can put a body suit on somebody and it can work Marvel contacted and contracted legacy effects to do the prosthetic and I'll be darned I mean every little hair on that thing every little bit of skin patch it's super convincing so we were thrilled and we saw that come through because it impacts the performance again you've got Chris Hemsworth really getting into the part because of the character he's embodying and for us it was just cleanup work really there were gonna be natural scenes as he's moving his arms around there could be folds and you had to kind of suture him into the thing there so there was a seam down the back that we had to clean up but by and large that's legacies prosthetic and hem sores hilarious performance our work is super easy in those instances because you know you're getting the best of both worlds practical and visual effects you want to go to space you want to go to space puppy space in the case of rocket for us pretty easy cuz we just stolen guardians we had to put him a new costume which was super cool but I think all of the the character work had been done pretty early on him so it was just continuing his arc as a character alright you must be mom I got the thing come on we gotta move there's no real reason to put dots on Bradley Cooper space the difference between a raccoon and a human face is it's pretty far off we will when we're in the room with him for a TR will have different cameras on him so that we can see whatever just stipulations he's doing we can see his facial expressions and we can take all that we can translate it into that character I live for the simple things like how much this is gonna hurt you do have to make these nonhumanoid things human you have to sell it you have to love them you have to you have to cheer for them you have to feel their pain and oftentimes you know that can come down to just a simple layer of water in the eye that we put in just to really pull you emotionally into a scene so on set we will have a body double Sean Gunn who is remarkable at getting two rockets four foot high and he just he folds himself up it's it's crazy how he's able to do it and walk and jump down from the ledges and those are important as we talked about because you want to have your actors acting against one another and also helps a great deal with camera blocking so that our camera guy knows how to go from a digital thing you know to a live-action element this is the fight of our lives and we're gonna win whatever it takes you may have noticed the time suits are a combination ant-man Tony Stark and the Guardians Tech and that took quite a while for us to land on by the time we got a final version we were already into principal photography which we knew we're gonna build them anyway because of how they needed to nano on and off with Tony's Tech so it ended up being that the costume department they didn't have time to develop fit and fabricate the all the costumes for those hero characters so we ended up doing it digitally and so you you don't notice but every time you see one of your heroes in that suit it's digital challenge there was getting the right color tone we also tried very early on in previous the notion of having the helmet be made of the guardians of the galaxy breather mesh that allowed them to travel into space we have some early development of them with that kind of being a bubble around their head but as soon as we started seeing it come up in the post of his footage the directors were like don't think that looks as heroic as it could possibly look so we went ahead and developed helmets for the suits the guardians tech then just became the visor [Music] for the final battle our department provided us with an overall map of where the different beats were gonna take place and we staged our previews accordingly there was a lot of nondescript areas but then we had some defining moments where we would try and make it recognizable as an area with a collapsed a for example or making sure that the water was coming over was distinguishable and sheer and gave me that sort of that impact of water rushing don't worry she's got chills for the woman of marvel scene where all the female characters collect before they take on Thanos everybody was there on set for that day so being on the stage with all of these tremendous actors it was pretty pretty cool moment to witness that was pretty energetic and fundamental I think people understood that they were watching ultimately we ended up having to roto some of our characters off during specific action beasts and then completely replace the entire background that happened quite a bit it gives the filmmakers more flexibility it allows them to steal parts from one performance to another part of the sequence so our building these sets in full CG really allows our filmmakers a lot of flexibility not only with their live-action elements but with the digital replacements than when you have a beat that doesn't cut together as smoothly as you'd like cat versus cap is an example of a lot of green-screen being shot for what you wouldn't otherwise think was an entirely digital and synthetic environment we had very bare-bones set when they were up on the walkway for example we had that part built we had the stairs built but pretty much everything else was a digital build all the glass all the building all the background all the office furniture everything is digital the background is a is a plate of New York New York skyline at appropriate height so that you can get the building tops in the distant background then you have another layer of kind of closer buildings that are more on two and a half D maybe not solid 3d and then you've got your building structures so the girders the millions the all the glass all the reflections off all the internal glass the plants the telephones the desks every little section of glass in that environment he's digital to shoot it we had Chris Evans act both parts and then the moments where they were interacting we had a body double so you can get the contact moment she could get the true fight moments and then whenever the face of the body devil was visible we can convincingly do face replacements so why not get your hero falling 30 feet in the air why not get your hero getting you know punched pretty hard were able to do it so that sequence it was a combination of Chris Evans shooting each side and then when they interacted with the body devil that is a full stop and want to shout out to the stunt team because they took some pretty hard Falls smacking down those stairs so it was a really impressive stunt we're all pretty excited when Captain Marvel came out and when we knew that we were gonna get to work with his character luckily we were standing on the shoulders of the great effects team that came before us so they had developed this really beautiful binary look that we were able to just get in the hands of our vendors that development was happening as we were posting so it was a little bit of us chasing them down the line but in the end I mean I think I really loved where they minded that like hirsute every time you see it in the movie when she's in her full costume is digital again the designs for those suits were not ready in time for us to photograph free so when you saw her at the beginning as she's rescuing Tony Stark when you see her come back when she's talking to NAT in the Avengers compound with rocket nebula and then in the final battle when she comes back and kind of saves the day that's all the digital soup in our world for visual effects we do want to try and get as much practical as we possibly can our supervisor made a bet with a line producer that we would have to replace the rat that appears when Scott Lang is coming back from the quantum realm to San Francisco and Dan insisted that we could find a rat that was trained that could actually behave on set and our line producer was convinced we're gonna have to replace it for those of you who are curious that is not a digital rat for all the things that we do and for all the things that we replace that is actually a practical acting rat I don't have his name but he's really there where'd he go the blip effect that we ended up calling it the sort of post snap people disappearing look that was months of development and it was supposed to be quiet it was supposed to be elegant you know a little bit of pain mixed in but the pain was really supposed to be felt by the audience and their characters disappearing so we wanted to give that silence to the viewership capturing that we did about several months of development we just kept running sin after sin and landed on something that the brothers really fell in love with it was just running a lot of samples over several months and finally getting to getting to the look the notion of having the characters reform on-screen did come up but I think everybody could visualize pretty clearly that that would just be a little too weird you don't really want to see that and much more powerful if it happens off screen the Tony snap that was challenging in that we knew the emotional weight that that was gonna carry we as a as our part and it had to take a very backseat to that moment to that performance so technically having the background in there that was not a problem but finding the right tone of the tendrils of the Infinity stones eating the way at the suit is a suit is struggling and fighting to protect Tony and you know in that moment that he's not powerful enough to withstand what's coming and to be able to portray that in a very quiet visual way and be in the background of what Robert was doing in that moment well it was that's what it took some time to get that right you'd be lucky to find a dry eye on that one we're gonna be okay you can Reza I know it's gonna be really hard for me in my career to top achieving a Thanos and a smart Hulk I mean those characters for visual effects person I mean those are pretty pretty peak so I'm enormous ly proud of the work that that we did and of the vendors who came to the table with our a-game and continually challenging each other to just get better and better so that the fans in studio and everybody really got performances from from these characters that I think will live on in history pretty significantly [Music] assemblé [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 8,097,654

Rating: 4.9351716 out of 5

Keywords: avengers, visual effects, avengers infinity war, infinity war, avengers endgame, marvel endgame, marvel avengers, endgame behind the scenes, infinity war behind the scenes, infinity war bts, marvel endgame behind the scenes, visual effects endgame, endgame cgi, marvel avengers cgi, avengers cgi, avengers cg, avengers endgame making of, making of avengers endgame, vfx avengers, avengers effects, avengers cgi how to, how avengers was made, marvel cinematic universe, wired

Id: BdHCp62jC84

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SlothTheHeroo]

Really cool how in-depth all this is. Blows my mind.

[u/goatofglee]

Wow. That was great. I'm really glad I took the time to watch it. I love how hard they worked to make sure everything was as authentic as possible for the actors so we can see their performance, and really get into the moment they're creating.