It might be the A-list stars donning the capes and masks, but the real heroes of today's
CGI-heavy comic book movies are the special effects artists — the men and women who
really make it all possible.
Of course, if you're not convinced that's the case, just try watching those movies before
the effects were added in.
2014 was a big year for Marvel movies — beyond the obvious successes of the MCU, Fox also
released its eagerly awaited X-Men sequel Days of Future Past.
As Marvel prepared to introduce Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the MCU's Quicksilver in Avengers: Age
of Ultron, Fox exercised its right to use the character by casting Evan Peters as the
lightning-fast mutant for the X-Men prequel/sequel combo.
The film earned rave reviews, and Peters' Quicksilver was one of its best parts, with
one scene in particular making the headlines.
Days of Future Past's now-iconic super slow-mo kitchen scene may have looked amazing on film,
but it wasn't at all easy to achieve.
The sequence had to be shot at a mind-blowing 3,600 frames per second — compare that to
the standard 24 for most films.
A frame rate that high requires huge amounts of light to work.
In an interview with io9, Peter said:
"It was incredibly bright.
A lot of the crew and Bryan [Singer] got to wear sunglasses.
And the actors had to keep their eyes open for a long, long time, with that bright light
just blaring at you.
It's like the sun.
It's brighter than the sun.
It's right there in your eyes.
But the end result is so worth it.
You just power through it."
Unlike its predecessor, 2016's X-Men Apocalypse didn't go down too well with the critics.
Still, it had a few redeeming features, chief among which was — yeah, you guessed it — Quicksilver's
moment in the spotlight.
Why mess with perfection, right?
Although technological advances made between Days of Future Past and Apocalypse made things
easier for the effects team, director Bryan Singer still chose to approach Quicksilver's
second major set piece as practically as possible.
This super slow-mo evacuation scene may have upped the ante from the kitchen scene in Days
of Future Past, but Singer told Den of Geek that you'd be surprised just how much of it
was real.
He explained:
"We did use certain visual effects, certain digital effects and explosive algorithms,
but we also took multiple phantom 3D cameras and ran them in protective cases through physical
explosions."
Just because the CGI team had it easy, however, doesn't mean everyone did.
"We blew up our sets.
We waited until we were done with them, and then blew them up.
We flew the cameras through at 80mph rolling at 3000 frames per second."
All in all, it took six weeks to make what amounted to two minutes of film.
Considering how well that scene went down with fans, however, there's a good chance
the crew decided it was more than worth the effort.
The fifth MCU entry marked Chris Evans' debut as Steve Rogers, a scrawny New Yorker who
becomes an all-American super soldier after agreeing to take part in a military experiment.
Evans got jacked for the role, though his bulky frame meant that filming the scenes
that take place before he transforms into Captain America was very tricky.
The visual effects department shrunk Evans' actual body for some shots, but they also
used a body double: actor Leander Deeny.
"The goal was to make the audience fall in love with the character before he gets any
muscles, before he puts on any costumes, before he holds the shield."
Visual effects put Evans' face on Leander's body.
And although his double was diligent about mimicking Evans' body language as best he
could, the effects company still had their work cut out, comparing it to, quote, "taking
the head of a rhinoceros and putting it on the body of a gazelle."
Logan was a milestone movie in Fox's long-running X-Men franchise, not only because it was Hugh
Jackman's final bow as Wolverine, but also because it was the first time fans got to
see the clawed mutant in all his R-rated glory.
The levels of violence on display during Logan were like nothing before seen in the X-Men
universe, and this meant the VFX team had their work cut out for them.
But Rising Sun Pictures' VFX supervisor Dennis Jones relished the challenge.
He told Art of VFX:
"Logan is more brutal, visceral, and has direct consequences for the characters involved.
The R rating that was confirmed from the start introduced another dynamic to play with, albeit
in a restrained fashion.
In The Wolverine, some of our shots had to be amended to remove blood and claw penetration,
so it was great to be able to [set] the character free from these constraints."
But that gore went far beyond just computer graphics.
Makeup designer Joel Harlow also told The Verge that:
"The level of physical trauma in this film is something I haven't had to contend with
since the early years when I was smearing blood around."
Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2's visual effects supervisor Chris Townsend wasn't part of the
team that worked on the first Guardians movie, but he had previously worked with Marvel on
Captain America: The First Avenger and Iron Man 3, receiving an Oscar nomination for the
latter.
When offered the opportunity to oversee the Guardians sequel, Townsend jumped at the chance
to return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
He told Rotoscopers:
"I'm a huge fan of the films.
I think from a creative and visual effects point of view, they're some of the funnest
stuff out there."
For the film's epic third act, in which the Guardians face Ego inside his own planet,
Townsend accepted a bid from Weta Digital, who picked up the action right after Ego reveals
to Quill that he gave his mother cancer.
Weta's Guy Williams told Art of VFX:
"From that point on, it is mostly our work.
We go all the way until Yondu and Quill rise above the planet as it is destroyed behind
them."
The New Zealand-based visual effects house had up to 490 staffers working on Guardians
of the Galaxy: Vol 2 at one stage, according to Williams, who admitted to losing plenty
of sleep over the highly complicated nature of the project.
Let's face it, if you're the King of Wakanda, you've got to ride in style.
And with the world's largest supply of the miracle metal vibranium at your disposal,
a Rolls Royce or an Air Force One-style Boeing 747 simply won't do.
Luckily, those Wakandan engineers and scientists clearly knew what they were doing when they
designed Black Panther's jet.
When King T'Challa arrived in Wakanda from his journeys abroad, he did so on a badass,
super-sleek stealth plane that looks like it came right out of Area 51.
You wouldn't know that if you were just watching the raw dailies, though.
In the original footage, there was no jet, no landing platform — heck, there wasn't
even any Wakanda.
There were just a handful of actors on set and a large blue screen in the background.
It's a little jarring to see that the Mad Titan, the destroyer of civilizations, the
wicked warlord Thanos, is actually… well, it's Josh Brolin wearing what looks like an
overpriced, skin-tight biker's outfit.
While Brolin is probably thankful he didn't have to wear space armor and paint his skin
purple for the role, he was still very much present during the filming of Infinity War
and Endgame thanks to the wonders of motion capture technology.
Brolin had never done mo-cap before, but he saw the light after seeing what his future
Avengers castmate Benedict Cumberbatch was able to do as Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation
of Smaug.
"I kill wherever I breathe and none shall stop me."
Indeed, Brolin's one-on-one interactions with his castmates added an extra layer of creepy
credibility that made the Mad Titan that much scarier in the final movies.
One of the most underrated aspects of Avengers: Infinity War was Peter Dinklage's performance
as Eitri, the King of the Dwarves.
Here, the actor — who only stands about 4'4" — was playing a 20-foot giant.
The Lord of the Rings films famously used forced perspective to make people look like
Hobbit-sized, but this film used a different approach, instead having Dinklage play opposite
mini-cutouts of Thor, Groot and Rocket Raccoon.
This makes Dinklage's scene-stealing performance that much more impressive, as he was basically
performing with dolls.
Chris Hemsworth, who also had to act opposite nothing, would shoot his scenes on a set,
while Dinklage performed against a blue-screen.
It's not always easy, this acting malarkey.
Infinity War's climactic Battle of Wakanda was filmed on an 8,000-acre farm called Chattahoochee
Hills Eventing, about 40 minutes outside Atlanta.
Instead of thousands of extras, only 70 performers were used, but they became more than 500 Wakandans
digitally, and proceeded to do battle with Thanos' army of 10,000 alien monsters known
as Outriders — which were also digitally produced.
The art department even added indigenous African trees and created an artificial river for
the scene, with a massive pump that was gushing out up to 30,000 gallons per minute.
That's a lot of effort for something that's barely even visible in the finished movie.
Thor's arrival at the Battle of Wakanda may very well be the most epic superhero entrance
ever.
But when you see what it looked like before the CGI was added… okay, it's still pretty
epic, but it's not quite the same as the finished product.
For this scene, Chris Hemsworth donned his full Thor attire and wielded a massive axe
that just need a little CG love to become the mighty Stormbreaker.
Of course, what he didn't have was a smack-talking, gun-toting raccoon on his shoulder, an angsty
teenage tree, hundreds of Wakandan warriors, or an invading army of 10,000 alien monsters.
So yeah, most of the stuff in this scene was added after the fact.
All the more reason to be impressed with Chris Hemsworth's performance, considering he was
basically acting by himself in a $10,000 Halloween costume.
Following Hulk's vicious beatdown at the hands of Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel
fans were on the edges of their seats waiting to find out what the future held for everyone's
favorite angry green giant.
None but the most die-hard comic book fans could have guessed it would be Professor Hulk.
According to Animation Boss, it was Framestore who breathed life into Endgame's Bruce Banner/Hulk
hybrid.
The process started by taking source footage of Mark Ruffalo and matching it to animation.
This animation was then used for 60 shots, with head cam footage used for reference.
According to Animation Supervisor Max Solomon:
"It was absolutely about channeling Bruce Banner.
His face is very expressive.
Every nuance, every little twitch and eye dart, slight curl of the lip and muscle tension
needed to be translated."
VFX Supervisor Stuart Penn explained:
"There was a lot of work involved as their face shapes are so different — Hulk is massive,
his mouth proportionally bigger, his eyes are sunken with deeper sockets.
Tiny changes to his face had a huge effect on the performance."
Having wiped out half of all life in Infinity War, a past version of Thanos returns to Earth
in Endgame's final act, in a desperate attempt to regain the six infinity stones from the
Avengers.
Unfortunately for him, this is the first time this version of the Mad Titan has gone up
against against Captain Marvel.
Fans had been eagerly anticipating Captain Marvel's bout against Thanos ever since she
was teased in the post-credits scene to Avengers: Infinity War.
After seeing what she was capable during both her own movie and her handful of earlier scenes
in Endgame, it became clear that the Mad Titan had more than met his match in Danvers.
But bringing this fight to life on set appears to have been considerably less epic than how
it wound up being on the big screen.
But hey, that's the magic of the movies for you.
Tony Stark's last stand against Thanos has to be one of the MCU's greatest ever scenes.
"And I am Iron Man."
That final line was a call-back to one first uttered 11 years prior to Endgame in Iron
Man, the film that launched the biggest franchise in history — and there couldn't have been
a better line for Tony Stark to go out on.
Strangely enough, however, it almost didn't happen.
During a Q&A that took place in the wake of the film's release, the Russo brothers explained:
"Tony used to not say anything in that moment.
And we were in the editing room going, 'He has to say something.
This is a character who has lived and died by quips.'
[...] And our editor Jeff Ford, who's been with us all four movies and is an amazing
storyteller, said, 'Why don't we just go full circle with it and say 'I am Iron Man.”
And we're like, 'Get the cameras!
We have to shoot this tomorrow.'"
The scene turned out the be the last one filmed during Endgame's reshoots, and the behind-the-scenes
reality of this iconic moment was thankfully captured by Downey's assistant Jimmy Rich.
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