[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey Marvel fans, I'm Ryan Penagos, a.k.a.
Agent M, and I'm so excited to be sitting here
with VFX supervisor of Marvel Studios
Avengers: Endgame, Dan DeLeeuw.
How are you doing, Dan?
Doing great.
So there's so much to talk about in this film.
You worked three years on it.
I-- let's just dive right into some stuff.
You ready?
Yep.
Lets' go.
RYAN PENAGOS: You know I think about this big battle,
how much creative input do you have in seeing
all this come together?
DAN DELEEUW: You know, you get kind
of a rough idea of what the story needs to be,
get a rough idea from Joe and Anthony.
It's like, OK, these are the beats we want to do,
we want the compound to blow up, we want to make a crater.
This is kind of where the dreams come true,
you know, in terms of growing up,
loving comics, loving films, and then
getting to design these fights.
I kind of describe it as you had your little action figures
you had when you were a kid.
And now like, you're grown up.
You're doing the same things with real people
and stunties and CG characters.
And you kind of sit down and start brainstorming.
It's like, what has to happen?
And it's like Cap's going to pick up Mjolnir.
He's going to take up--
he's going to pick up the hammer, one way or another.
If it's the last thing I do, he's picking up that hammer.
Assemble.
RYAN PENAGOS: So you get to the moment
where the portals start opening up.
How many layers are going on in a shot like that?
It's pretty--
I mean, astronomical is a kind of an easy way to describe it.
We had our big days where we had everybody there.
You kind of see it in the big masters,
and when Cap says assemble, everybody's standing there
and we had all the actors on set.
And then depending on who we had,
it dictated what would be CG and what wouldn't be.
We had like a dirt floor, we had some wreckage and rubble,
and some of that we would replace, depending on if it
made it easier to light the shot or the composition
would get better.
But when you get into the portals opening up,
you've got everybody on this side of the portals with the CG
crater, CG fire, CG smoke, CG atmosphere, CG embers, CG
dust, CG ash floating around.
And then you've got the portals themselves,
which they're their own effect simulation,
complex effects simulation.
And then you've got all the "digis" walking out.
We just didn't want to make it feel
like they're coming from kind of this flat space
when you see the portal.
You wanted it to feel like it's a dimensional space.
With Marvel, too, it is a shared universe, everything's online.
Everything's in the archives.
So if you need to go back and get Contraxia,
you just go back and get Contraxia.
That's so cool.
It's just there, right, so--
and then we had Andy Thy built portions of New Asgard,
so we did portions of New Asgard.
So it's like you've got everything in this world,
and plus everything from all the other worlds
that they're coming from.
So it's almost incalculable in terms of how much we have.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Is that everyone?
What, you want even more?
RYAN PENAGOS: We then get into the battle.
You've got that wonderful scene, Cap rallying everyone,
he assembles everyone, charge, and you
have a lot of actual, physical, practical people and effects
and stuff.
They are charging into just hordes of enemies.
But those are all VFX, right?
DAN DELEEUW: Yeah, no, the before and after of those
are the best before and afters ever,
in terms of just the work that we did
and just the general comedy of what
was actually happening on set.
[LAUGHTER]
So if you look at the shots and there's
the shot where we begin kind the one
where you come in, right, when Giant
Man punches the Leviathan.
But you're zooming in on that, you've got
all the heroes running forward.
And you've got your actors there and then there's
maybe like six guys in motion capture suits running at them,
again, just to kind of let all the actors
know, generally, where the eyeline
is for the approaching aliens.
But yeah, Thanos's army was kind of weak in that version
of the show.
He just came with six. DAN DELEEUW: Yeah,
Oh no.
[LAUGHTER]
DAN DELEEUW: Yeah, it's sometimes the befores are just
some of the oddly crude things, but it
was something that worked.
It got them there.
It was like, we were hooking it up, we had the kind of big shot
where you kind of went into the live action of everybody
running together.
Then you comes up into the air to see Giant Man punch
Leviathan, you go back to CG, and then
you come back down again on Panther and Okoye and Shuri.
And that was shot as a separate little piece on their set.
And then as you pan left, you get a little bit
of a CG Drax coming in that pulls you from that,
that lands into the live action Dave Bautista, who's
on this kind of, I don't know, large punching bag
thing with stunt guys hanging all over it,
trying to make sure Dave didn't fall off of it.
And then there's, you know, the guy in the mocap
suit for Korg, which, just, all of it,
it's this elegant ballet.
And it's really neat.
All right, last but not least, we have to talk about one
of the moments that made crowds roar, that gives
you all the biggest feels.
It's when we see all the women of Marvel come together.
They're on the battlefield.
How much of that was filmed practically,
how much was added in, and how do you bring that all together?
Well we had everyone there.
There was like two or three weeks where everybody is there.
You've got every Avenger from every movie
that we've done all on set at the same time.
And so it was a great day to go to set,
because it's like, whoa, there's Pepper, there's Okoye,
there's Valkyrie.
There's like all the characters you love
are actually there on set.
So when they all come together, the idea
of having this kind of passing of the torch,
passing the gauntlet, there was a lot of symbolism going on.
But then it was also something that
was kind of special to do, to bring all the women of Marvel
together.
So when we shot it, you had everybody there.
Valkyrie, we put in, later, a different element, because she
was on the back of the Pegasus.
You didn't have a practical Pegasus for this?
We tried, but again, that's probably like three years out.
Cloning's two years, three years.
But anyway, you know, she's landing in the back.
For the most part, we had everybody there.
And so we go ahead and shot him, you
pull them, you'll add Pepper's armor later, you'll have--
Hope comes in as the Wasp and grows,
so you actually have Evangeline there kind
of walking in the shot, and you just kind of
paint her out and then just kind of have
the Wasp grow into her size.
I was sitting in a crowd opening night
and I watched a kid in front of me
jump up out of his chair, arms up in the air, scream,
everybody's like crying and laughing and cheering.
How much fun is it for you guys to put all this together
and then to see it work?
It's the best part.
You know, it's the--
we're all fans too, right.
So then there's all these moments that you want to see.
And then for us, it's something that you see it in previs
and you're kind of like, OK, that's really cool.
It's going to be really great.
And so you see all these scenes in pieces
and you see them kind of come together in editorial.
And I remember the first time we kind of cut
the portals together, and Jeff Ward called
me and he said, take a look.
And it's like, you a little tear in the corner of your eye.
And then you're kind of like, this is great.
This is going to work.
And then part of the fun is then going in
to see with the real audience and just kind of see,
OK, is this going to work?
You're sitting there and you're like,
oh my god, this totally works.
[LAUGHTER]
You go opening weekend and then people
are just going nuts over it.
And I think that's the best part, the most
rewarding part, that everybody loved what we did,
which is great.
Dan, thanks so much for sharing so much
about Marvel Studio's Avengers: Endgame.
You guys, make sure you pick up the film now.
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