[MUSIC PLAYING]
Marvel Studios' She-Hulk Attorney at Law has some
smashing visual effects, which is why
I'm speaking with VFX supervisor Shannon
Justison and Dadi Einarsson.
Hey folks.
All right, let's jump in.
Now there are some unbelievable visual effects in the series.
But what's the most interesting thing
about working on the series?
I think the most interesting thing for doing the VFX
for a show like this is that we have a CG lead
and that has never been done on a Marvel television
show before because it's a little crazy.
I mean it's a huge show.
There are digital humans involved.
So you're creating something using a lot of input data
and a lot of performance capture.
But ultimately it's a CG creation
that's going to be acting alongside actual human actors.
It was all about making sure that we had everything in place
to get the best performance recorded,
so that we could deliver on a she-hulk character that
represented Tatiana's acting ability.
Still in control No the overwhelming feelings of rage?
No.
A normal amount of rage.
So you know walking into that room you were going to have
a fully CG lead character.
Where do you start?
So if you're going to create a fully digital character like
She-Hulk, there's sort of two streams you're pursuing
at the same time.
The first is Visdev, which would be standard
for any sort of CG character.
We have a visual development department here at Marvel.
They look at all the comic books and they look at how
our story is telling her story.
And then the other side of that is that we look at our casting.
The important part of this is that we
need to know what Tatiana looks like
in order to be able to transform her in and out of She-Hulk.
We in VFX subject her to a lot of scanning and photography.
That then goes to build stage and that
goes through multiple steps of development,
making the model look as real as possible, just
in terms of like a physical proportions
and the physical aspect of it.
So once you've done all of that digital work
you have Tatiana Maslany performance.
How do you pair the CG and her performance together?
We captured petabytes of data.
It was absurd how much data we pulled off the set.
We actually had a really big on set VFX team
just because we had so much data acquisition to do.
When we're recording mocap and H.M.C., on set,
we've got several sets of data that we're
actually kind of picking out.
So the mocap data actually records not video
but it is straight data.
And that is purely data that's recorded to a digital skeleton,
so if you had walked over to the mocap brain bar
while we were recording, you could see a little skeleton
running around doing Tatiana's or Mark's performances,
which is pretty wild.
Once you have all of that data and footage,
how do you bring them together into a scene
to create a realistic She-Hulk performance?
In order to make She-Hulk more lifelike,
we always start with the animation first,
because for a character like this,
that's the foundation of everything that is to follow.
I mean, there are so many things
that we consider when we're trying to make
her feel as real as possible.
We try to make it as close to what Tatiana did as possible,
and really see what the essence of each one
of those performances is.
So starting from the edit, then we
can start working from selects.
Based on the selects, we would for instance
we say we have a She-Hulk shot.
This is the shot that the editors have chosen.
This is the mocap performance.
All that goes over to a vendor and then
they start their process of tracking the plates,
ingesting the mocap, which means transferring the mocap
data to the She-Hulk rig.
And yeah, the thing that's most exciting
is just seeing it come together.
Seeing it come to life.
It's a long process.
We would start by post vising, and where Tatiana would
be walking around in her mocap suit,
we would then put in a She-Hulk in kind of a low Res quick turn
around post this form so that could start to inform our edit.
While the animation team is working away,
the shaders team is working on refining
all of the look of her skin texture, her hair
texture, her clothing texture.
We're building out her clothes.
We're building out her shoes.
Then really once you get turnover and start
to build that scene and see the things coming to life,
you start to match the lighting.
You start to see the performance go on the actual She-Hulk
animation puppet.
It's super exciting seeing that character come to life once.
Once have an animated performance that we like
and the studio buys off on, at that point
we start all of what we call the Sims, the simulations.
That's where we start the clothing simulations, the hair
simulations, and because all of that
is driven by the animation, we don't
really start that until after the animation is complete.
She-Hulk has so many different looks.
I imagine that's a lot of work.
How typical is it for a CG character
to have that many outfits?
Yeah so She-Hulk has 25 outfits,
which is crazy amount of different outfits,
like usually CG characters will have one, maybe two.
She has to be in court.
She has to be casual.
She has to be kind of working out.
But you still get to have a lot of fun
with like how do the clothes transform?
What happens to her shoes?
DADI EINARSSON: Each one of these outfits
has to be digitally created.
It has to have its simulation.
There'll be multiple layers to it.
In one of our episodes, She-Hulk turns up
at a Gala event for female lawyer of the year,
and she is wearing a sequenced dress.
She-Hulk's Gala dress the sequin dress.
It's incredibly complicated and terrifying to build in CG.
DADI EINARSSON: The dress is mind blowing.
It is so amazingly well done.
I think there are over a million sequins that sparkle.
They catch the light correctly.
They have to be form fitting on her.
They have to flow with the dress and I'm just constantly
aware of when I'm reviewing those shots
just how like what an achievement it
was to make that dress.
Oh my God.
That thing is incredible.
It's so well done.
It really is so incredible, and the whole series
really is so special.
What are you most proud of looking
back at this entire series?
I'm really excited for people to see this character.
I'm excited for kids, my kids to see her.
And yeah, just being involved with of bringing to the screen
so many shots of a digital human.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to be
involved with something so big.
I really feel like it's been an honor
to be part of the she-hulk team, especially as the VFX team.
I love origin stories and she's such a fun and like witty
and she's meta.
And she's just such a great character.
So to be a part of her origin story is just a privilege.
Oh, Shannon and Dadi, it was such a blast getting to talk
with you a bit more about She-Hulk
and how you bring her to life.
Thank you so much.
And of course everyone make sure you go watch all episodes
of Marvel Studios' She-Hulk: Attorney at Law
now streaming only on Disney Plus.