MONICA: Higher.
KAMALA: Further.
CAROL: Faster.
Together.
TARA DEMARCO: Hi, I am Tara DeMarco,
and I am the visual effects supervisor for Marvel
Studios' The Marvels.
Today, we are going to be looking at the powers
of our three leading ladies.
Carol, Monica, and Kamala all have light-based powers.
In this film, it is so important to get
the look of these powers right because the characters
are entangled.
What the--
Where's our daughter?
Yes, where is Kamala?
- Who's Kamala? - Oh, my god.
Oh, my god.
Oh, my god!
Is this an Avengers test?
In our film, The Marvels, we allow
Kamala to push the boundaries of the power
she unlocked in her show.
She creates slides, shields, and orbs.
Kamala's hard light is interesting in that it
is trapped light, but we don't want
it to seem self-illuminated.
It isn't designed to be super glowy or stretchy,
so we try really hard to keep it faceted
and to look a little bit like crystal
and a little bit like light.
In visual effects, we always want something real
for the actors to have.
Both so that they feel that they're doing the action,
and also that there's something for us to track to later.
Occasionally, we would bring in Plexiglas disks
for her to jump on.
She also had a big Plexiglas platform
that she fell on for the falling swap
sequence above Jersey City.
I can't.
Can you--
I got it.
TARA DEMARCO: In WandaVision, when Monica walked
through Wanda's Hex, she discovered that she could see
kind of like a spectrometer.
She could see all the different wavelengths
and could tune her vision to see powers or electricity or sound
waves or all different things.
Monica, as she grows through The Marvels,
discovers that she has more and more powers.
She learns how to fly.
We see her build up and blast.
We see her invisible.
We see a few forms of her intangible.
Monica's intangible design in this film
sometimes looks green and sometimes looks blue.
And sometimes, it looks like all of the colors, in the same way
that her spectrum vision can see all different colors of
the electromagnetic spectrum.
But we also wanted to preserve all of the amazing performances
of Teyana.
So Monica, when she is intangible,
is still partially visible.
We did not want to turn her into an invisible person.
In the finale of The Marvels, Monica really levels up.
She is blasted with all of the power of Carol
and all of the power of Kamala's bangles,
and can absorb that energy and hold it so that she can help
close the tear in space time.
This was a huge power change for Monica.
And I think it best resembles how far she comes in the film.
Carol Danvers, prodigal child of the Milky Way.
Carol, AKA Captain Marvel, has her
light-based power based on the jet engine
of an Air Force fighter plane.
We wanted Carol to be familiar to the audience in every way.
She has her photon fist, her binary effect.
And in this film, we wanted her to grow hotter
than ever before because in the finale of our film,
she restarts a sun.
Carol's binary effect is made of a few different layers
that we can dial up or down based on what
she's doing in the scene.
We never want the binary to be distracting
from the performance, so we have elements that go
in front of her and behind her.
And depending on the nature of the shot,
we'll increase the visibility of what's on top of her
or what's behind her.
The interesting thing about working
on a film with three heroes is that often
the design will leapfrog.
A breakthrough in the look of the design of a power for one
character might lead the studio and the filmmakers
to look at another character and say, hey,
that person could use it too.
There is a subtle flaring that we took reference
from the aurora borealis.
This was established in the first Captain Marvel
film with her binary effect.
And we have a hint of that effect
in Monica and Kamala's powers as well.
- We're a team? - No, no, no, no.
We're not a team.
TARA DEMARCO: The Marvels was such
an exciting project to work on.
We have three lady heroes, a lady villain,
a Nick Fury, and an incredible female
directing-producing team.
It was truly an honor to work with this crew.
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