[MUSIC PLAYING]
They're are arrows more dangerous than that one?
Marvel Studios' Hawkeye is always on target, thanks
to VFX supervisor, Greg Steele.
Hey, Greg.
Hey, Lorraine.
How are you?
Thanks for having me today.
Oh, I am doing excellent.
But, you know, much like Kate, I am
dying to know more about all of the different trick
arrows in Hawkeye's arsenal.
So how did you and the production team
work together to create these arrows?
The props department is really involved
in coming up with a lot of these designs, which is great.
I mean, the work they did in building these,
they're like little pieces of artwork
in terms of the complexity and the design aesthetic.
It's really great.
And it all lives within the realm of what's
come before in the other films.
And the arrows that the characters were holding
were not real, but they were based
on things the prop department had put together.
Like the tip of the PYM arrow had
a blue illumination and the word, you could read it.
We scan pretty much everything we do when we're on the film,
so we'll scan all the locations and the actors and the props
also.
You've got the geometry, which is
the foundational shape of it.
And then you go in and you try to replicate the feeling
of the surface and quality.
So the shininess, how beat up it is,
where there's little lights that could turn on,
things like that.
And then you age it and try and make it look
like it kind of belongs in the real world
versus being totally synthetic.
It's definitely a lot of work, but it's so worth
it when you see it in scenes like the epic
car chase in episode three.
What are some of the different arrows we see in that scene
and how did you bring them to life?
So, the putty arrow is one of the first arrows
that Kate shoots during the car chase.
Once the arrow hits, it expands and creates
this almost like expansion foam-type quality.
So to create something like that,
we ended up just shooting the plate of the truck driving.
And then in post-production, we did effects simulations
on the glass.
So they reference material that we had found of expansion foam
and some slimes and things like that that everyone liked.
And then, basically, put it all together and just kind of
gave a really kind of goopy messy look.
The explosive arrow was one that was
launched by Kate at the beginning of the sequence.
It jams into the bumper of a van and causes
a giant explosion as it flips end-over-end,
kind of rolling towards them almost.
The special effects team and the stunts team
rigged up two different events of a real van.
One was to get it rolling so it could
be kind of chasing along after the car,
and one to get it going initially.
And then it was up to us in visual effects to kind of help
augment that a little bit, clean up the stunt rigging.
We added some additional fire and some other explosions
to kind of just make it all tie together amongst the shots.
The suction cup arrow is what appears
to be a very benign suction cup arrow at the beginning
of the sequence, which ends up actually saving them
at the end as Clint suction cup onto a subway car
as it's speeding below on the Manhattan bridge.
Get the plunger arrow on it.
So the Octo-grabber arrow is an arrow
device that shoots cables out from
itself and then pulls back in.
Kate, basically, fires the arrow into the front of the truck
that Cozi's driving.
It spools out all these cables inside the Christmas lot,
which they're driving through, and pulls all the Christmas
trees causing them to smash all over the vehicle
and kind of make them drive out of control and crash.
We shot all the plates without Christmas trees in the lot.
So we left space in a Christmas tree lot dressed with trees
that the cars could kind of drive-through
and the stuntman can kind of do all
the action they needed to do.
For most of the shots, we were putting all these computer
generated trees that were built based on some reference
that we had.
There's some that are wrapped in,
encased in kind of a wrapping, and some
just kind of furled out.
They built those and then they rigged them up
so they could simulate such that if you smashed a tree
into something, all the branches and all the pine needles
would do what they're supposed to.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Merry Christmas.
So the acid arrow is utilized when Kate and Clint are
speeding towards an intersection with cross traffic
and they need to, basically, create a hole in the traffic
so they can sneak through it with the guys
chasing after them.
So Clint hands Kate two acid arrows
and she's instructed to shoot them at the traffic lights.
They fly through the air and they hit a CG traffic light
pole, it burns away, and they kind of fall to the ground
simmering and smoldering.
The PIM arrow, there's two forms PIM arrows.
There's the ones that shrink and then there's
the ones that grow much larger.
At the end of the sequence, they're trapped,
the car has been smashed, and Clint
tells Kate to take a regular arrow
and shoot it up in the sky.
We see that Clint has got a blue PIM arrow.
And he fires at it as the arrow is coming down
and it scales up and chops the truck basically in half.
It was something that we had played
around with in terms of how the arrow
could go through the truck.
I believe it was Kevin who had the idea.
He said, no, no, shoot it straight up
and then have it come straight down
and chop the truck in half.
And it ended up actually working out really well.
Everything in that environment is all CG.
So the bridge, the environment of New York, and all that
was all basically replicated.
It's a real synergistic thing between stunts
and special effects and visual effects.
That's one of the fun things about the job
is actually being able to work with all the different teams
to put this together.
Well, it takes a village.
And just when we think we've seen it all,
you pull out all of the stops for that final battle
in the finale.
Now, what are some of the arrows that you bring back
and some of the new arrows that you introduced for this scene?
So the luminous arrow was, I think,
the first arrow that Kate shoots inside the ice rink.
And that's basically a huge blinding light
just to try to kind of blind them so they
can kind of get some cover.
I'd say 95% of the shots were shot in Atlanta on a backlot.
For us, it was taking all the footage that we had shot
and just augmenting what was a one story building
and turn it into a big 65 floor high
rise skyscraper in New York.
The electromagnetic arrow is something
that's used at the beginning of the ice rink fight.
The big question during prep was when we were kind of designing
this was why don't all the bad guys just shoot them
once they're down inside the rink?
So we came up with this gag of Clint
shooting an electromagnetic arrow at the flagpole,
and it basically creates this electro net all around the ice
rink and it pulls all of the metal-based weaponry
out of the bad guys' hands and kind
of sticks it to the flagpoles.
In post, we put in the electro aspect of it
with the lightning bolts and electricity and things
like that.
So the acid arrow comes back actually in the final battle.
It's before Clint lets Kate use all the good trick arrows
when they get down to the ice.
She's basically up in FAO Schwarz,
and Clint is stuck in a tree at this point.
So she, basically, fires it at the trunk of the tree
and cause the weight of the tree to actually fall over.
Clint goes flying, everything is a hot mess
down on the ice rink.
Special effects built us a special tree trunk
that we could actually crack.
Our vendor team put in a the acid
that was eating away at it, causing bubbles
and smoke coming off it.
And then the tree itself as that falls just
has a massive amount of stimulation going on.
Kate fires the needle arrow towards a place
where a bunch of tracksuit mafia are standing.
So she fires it, it hits the ice,
and winds up small needles, like a porcupine,
go flying out of this thing and just stabbing into all the guys
around it, just kind of causing mayhem, basically,
at the beginning of the fight.
The actual final effect was designed during post-vis
as we were doing it.
We had the actual plates and we just basically implemented
a CG version of that shooting until all
the actors who were miming getting
hit by the different needles.
The tranq arrow is an arrow that is a delivery system yet again.
So the main arrow goes into a guy's shoulder,
so it's just a bunch of little hypodermic needles
that shoot into the different characters.
But the performances, again, for something like that
is really what sell it.
The airbag, again, is one of those great combinations
between stunts and visual effects and second unit teams.
It was something the stunts team came up with in their stunt
biz about this concept of a cool air-bag that could kind of go
under the characters and grow huge and send
them flying into the air.
To actually implement that, the stunt team set up
a bunch of cranes and they could kind of actually
pull the characters up into the air.
So we were able to actually use real people
doing the stunts versus having to go to a digit double
all the time.
The sonic concussion arrow is an arrow that first gets revealed
in episode 4, and that's basically
an arrow that creates a large kind
of a three-beat concussive sonic blast.
So, again, we used similar techniques to what we had done,
creating these concentric compressed air
simulations to kind of just make it feel
very powerful and concussive.
The giant explosion arrow that kind of
happens at the end of the ice rink sequence
is very similar to the one that took out the van earlier.
But for the most part, the lighting teams created
some interactive light for us.
The stunt team rigged up some performers
to come flying through the air, get up off the ground,
and get pulled by these cables and come flying forward.
Visual effects-wise, we ended up adding all the explosion
and the debris that would fly.
The splitting of the regular arrow.
So Clint's down to two arrows with three bad guys
coming at him.
So what he does is he fires one and then quickly fires
another one with greater force, causing
that second arrow to cut through the first arrow,
splitting it in half.
So he basically creates three arrows.
We created all the camera movement in computer graphics.
We had our virtual set so we could
put them anywhere and just kind of move the camera through it.
So we chased along behind the arrow in animation
and split it, added effect simulations,
and things like that to make it very clear
that it's a wooden arrow.
The PIM arrow comes back again in the ice rink fight,
but this time instead of actually
making something gigantic, it's used to shrink down something.
And there's several tracksuit mafia
that are careening a big truck into the ice rink
to try to kind of smash Kate and Clint as a last ditch effort.
And as it's coming towards them, Kate
pulls out a PIM shrinking arrow and fires it at the van,
shrinking it down.
We shot as much as we could with the actors in the frame,
but a lot of their shots ended up just
being fully computer-generated with the trucks barreling
across the Plaza because we had built our CG environment,
we could just drive our CG trucks through it.
We had computer generated people standing
down there as the truck hurtles towards them.
So after that moment, Kate turns to Clint and says,
well, I wasn't really expecting it to end that way-type thing.
This kind of odd moment where an owl comes in and takes
that little truck away.
Well, there goes that.
Now, was that a real owl or was it something that you
had to create in post with CGI?
It was a CG owl.
It was Kevin's idea to have the owl in the tree.
You obviously read about the owl that was in the Rockefeller
tree that year.
And they called it Rocky.
So that's what we've called our little owl.
And she's really small, she's only about yay big,
and she looks just like the real one.
And it was a very specific type, so we matched pretty much all
the feathering and everything to make it
look as authentic as possible.
But she's very adorable.
[LAUGHTER]
That she is.
And now looking back at this entire series,
what was your favorite part of working on it?
I mean, the content itself is amazing.
One of the original Avengers, his storyline, and handing
the mantle over to Kate Bishop.
It's a really cool storyline that we're all
very excited to be working on.
Everyone's kind of at their A-game on these projects.
And it's really neat to be able to kind
of collaborate with them.
That's probably one of my favorite parts
of the whole process.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
Thank you so much, Greg.
And, of course, go check out all of those trick
arrows in Marvel Studios' Hawkeye,
now streaming all episodes only on Disney Plus.