[Thanos] We're in the Endgame now.

[triumphant music]

My name's Jen Underdahl and I was

the Visual Effects Producer on Marvel's Endgame.

My main tasks are to work with our directors

Joe and Anthony and our studio heads

to make sure that the vendors we are bringing onboard

are the right vendors for the scope

of work that we have for the show.

I have to look at these two movies as a single project.

It's Thanos's movie, Infinity War is

so in 2016 we knew that very early on we were

going to need to test this before we even

shot a frame of footage.

To give some sort of ease and peace of mind

to our filmmakers that yes, this guy

could carry 2/3s of the film.

We worked with Josh's people and our production staff

to bring him in and work with Joe and Anthony.

We did some very early testing in a MOCAP volume.

We had the head cam setup, he's got dots on his face

and those two cameras are capturing his facial performance.

So we kinda did this whole gauntlet,

yeah, gauntlet of testing and scanning,

capturing every aspect of Josh's face

in different range of motions.

So not only was it a technical discovery for us,

it was also a character discovery

for Josh, Joe, and Anthony.

And what we found, we kind of had imagined

Thanos being this big mean, over-the-top character,

but how Josh played him was beautiful.

His performance was menacing, but subtle.

Terrifying, but in little flinches,

so we realized at that moment that we really needed to have

a company that could capture all that

and pull his performance through the prosthetics

so that when you are like this on Thanos,

you felt the terror in your bones

with this character 'cause you had to.

All that for a drop of blood.

[Jen] Digital Domain and WETA were key

in Thanos's development, so we gave them all

this scanning data, we gave them all this footage,

and in the end a couple months later they turned around

a version of Thanos that looked crazy like Josh.

Ideally in any situation when you have a digital character

you wanna have two actors, acting to one another,

that's where the magic happens.

And we can replace it digitally,

but we certainly can't manufacture that performance,

so it was really important for us

to put the actors in a situation where they are

speaking to one another, face to face, eyeline to eyeline.

Now it gets complicated by the fact

that Thanos is 15 feet tall.

If Josh is in movement for example,

fighting with anybody, we put proxies on him.

We put displacement suits so that if you have

to touch him or interact with him in any way,

the opposing actor's hands are in the correct position.

Eyelines, same thing, we will oftentimes put

an eyeline on a pole, on a backpack,

he looks kinda silly on set, but he's pretty awesome

about it, but oftentimes, whatever we try

as much as possible to get eyeline to eyeline.

Maybe smash a few things along the way.

I think it's gratuitous, but whatever.

[Hulk growls]

[glass tinkles]

[Jen] So the whole goal with Smart Hulk

was to bring old Hulk together with Dr. Banner

and what was that gonna look like.

I put the brains and the brawn together,

and now look at me, best of both worlds.

[Jen] Borrowing from the 2D designs that came from Marvel,

we then had to sculpt Smart Hulk into a 3D model.

You always wanna have little anchor points

in your digital characters where you see

your actor's features to some degree.

I may have kind of fell in love with him actually

when we started to see him come to life,

and the more we found we incorporated Mark,

the more his performance also stayed

true to the digital performance.

When I had the gauntlet, the Stones,

I really tried to bring her back.

[Jen] ILM, they had done Hulk from Avengers one,

so we knew that they already knew this character,

they knew his skin, how to deal with his skin technically,

they knew his musculature, inside and out,

so really blending him with a more humanoid

proportioned character was the right

way to go, casting-wise for that character.

So we find that in visual effects,

the more we stay out of the way of the filmmakers

and the actors, the better results we're gonna get.

The footage is what we derive all of our artistry from

so when that is genuine, when that is fluid,

when that is moving, we really get the best of both worlds.

In a case like Smart Hulk, you wanna make sure

that Mark is interacting on set

with all the other characters.

In the case of the Avengers compound, he needs to

be there with Tony, he needs to be there with Natasha,

he needs to be in that scene, so we'll set up

a motion capture volume on set.

So he's surrounded by cameras and he's in a MOCAP suit.

Again, visual effects needs to really

in all of our technical gathering, we need to take

a backseat to what's happening on

the performance, what's happening on set.

[Sam] Cap?

Hi, Sam.

[Jen] So in the case of Captain America,

what would a super soldier look like

if he had aged 106 years, what would his skin look like?

So we did some development with that,

getting targets with our studio and our directors

to say hey, is this where we should be aiming.

Once they bought off on what that look was gonna be,

we then started casting for a skin double,

looking around for an old guy who approximates the same

age and face shape of Cap or what Cap would be.

He was shot in the same lighting conditions,

right after Chris performs, he gives the same lines,

he tries to emulate Chris's performance as much as possible

so that it doesn't take a whole lot of hammering

when we go dink onto Chris's face.

In addition to the skin double,

you also need to give him sort of an older man's body,

older man's overall profile, so as you've seen

with skinny Steve in Captain America one,

Lola is able to take significant size off of Chris Evans

pretty much in every instance on Captain America one

where we're shooting Chris Evans, it's Chris Evans,

that's his body and he's a big dude.

We needed to get him down to a 90 pound weakling

to do so, Lola will do an overall warp on his body

and literally squish him down so that he fits

in the plate as this character.

They did the same sort of thing,

though not with as heavy a hand for old Cap.

They took some neck off of him, so he wasn't quite

as beefy here, and we shrunk his shoulders

and sort of his overall profile to give him

that 106 year old super soldier look.

Boys, oh my God, [laughs]

oh my God, it's so good to see you.

[Jen] Now we've got Endgame Thor.

Endgame Thor has lost everything repeatedly

so he has dealt with it by eating a lot and drinking a lot

and playing video games with Korg and Miek.

So to get this character we thought really hard

to make sure that we had a practical solution to this

because we've seen it done before, you can put

a body suit on somebody and it can work.

Marvel contacted and contracted Legacy Effects

to do the prosthetic and I'll be darned,

every little hair on that thing, every little bit

of skin patch, it's super convincing.

So we were thrilled when we saw that come through

'cause it impacts performance again.

When you've got Chris Hemsworth really getting into the part

because of the character that he's embodying

and for us it was just clean up work really.

There are gonna be natural seams

as he's moving his arms around,

there's gonna be folds and you had to kinda suture him

into the thing so there was a seam down the back

that we had to clean up, but by and large that's

Legacy's prosthetic and Hemsworth's hilarious performance.

Our work is super easy in those instances

because getting the best of both worlds

practical and visual effects.

Oh, look it's like a little puppy,

all happy and everything.

Do you wanna go to space, you wanna go to space, puppy?

I'll take you to space.

[Jen] In the case of Rocket, for us, pretty easy

'cause we just stole him from Guardians. [laughs]

We had to put him in a new costume which was super cool,

but I think all of the character work had been done

pretty early on him, so it was just

continuing his arc as a character.

Hey, you must be Mom.

I got the thing, come on, we gotta move.

[Jen] There's no real reason to put dots

on Bradley Cooper's face.

The difference between a raccoon and a human face,

they're pretty far off.

We will, when we're in the room with him for ADR,

we'll have different cameras on him

so we can see whatever gesticulations he's doing.

We can see his facial expressions and we can take all that,

we can translate it into that character.

I live for the simple things.

Like how much this is gonna hurt.

[Jen] You do have to make these non-humanoid things human.

You have to sell it, you have to love 'em,

you have to cheer for 'em, you have to feel their pain.

And oftentimes, that can come down to just

a simple layer of water in the eye that we put in

just to really pull you emotionally to a scene,

so on set we'll have a body double, Sean Gunn,

who is remarkable at getting to Rocket's four foot high.

He folds himself up, it's crazy how he's able to do it

and walk and jump down from ledges.

And those are important as we talked about

because you wanna have your actors

acting against one another, and also helps

a great deal with camera blocking.

So that our camera guy knows how to go

from a digital thing to a live action element.

This is the fight of our lives.

And we're gonna win.

Whatever it takes.

[Jen] You may have noticed, the Time Suits

are a combination of Ant Man, Tony Stark, and Guardians tech

and that took quite a while for us to land on.

By the time we got a final version

we were already into principal photography

which we knew we were gonna build them anyway

because how they needed to nano on and off

with Tony's tech, so it ended up being

that the costume department, they didn't have time

to develop fit and fabricate all the costumes for those

hero characters, so we ended up doing it digitally.

So you don't notice, but every time you see

one of your heroes in that suit, it's digital.

Challenge there was getting the right color tone.

We also tried very early on in previs,

the notion of having the helmet be made of the

Guardians of the Galaxy breather mesh

that allowed them to travel into space.

We have some early development of them with that

being a bubble around their head,

but as soon as we started seeing it come up

in the postvis footage, the directors were like,

don't think that looks as heroic as it could possibly look.

So we went ahead and developed helmets for the suits.

The Guardians tech then just became the visor.

[heroic music]

For the final battle, Art Department provided us

with an overall map of where the different beats

were gonna take place and we staged our previs accordingly.

There was a lot of nondescript areas,

but then we had some defining moments where we would

try and make it recognizable as an area

with a collapsed A for example

or making sure that the water was coming over

was distinguishable and shear

and gave you that impact of water rushing.

Don't worry.

She's got help.

[Jen] For the women of Marvel scene

where all the female characters collect

before they take on Thanos, everybody was there on set

for that day, so being on the stage with

all of these tremendous actors was pretty,

pretty cool moment to witness that.

It was pretty energetic and monumental,

I think people understood what they were watching.

Ultimately we ended up having to roto some

of our characters off during specific action beats

and then completely replace the entire background.

That happened quite a bit, it gives

the filmmakers more flexibility.

It allows them to steal parts from one performance

to another part of the sequence,

so our building these sets in full CG

really allows our filmmakers a lot of flexibility

not only with their live action elements,

but with the digital replacements.

Then when you have a beat that doesn't cut together

as smoothly as you'd like.

You gotta be [beep] me.

Cap verses Cap is an example of a lot of green screen

being shot for what you wouldn't otherwise

think was an entirely digital synthetic environment.

We had very barebones set, when they were up on the walkway,

for example, we had that part built,

we had the stairs built, but pretty much

everything else was a digital build.

All the glass, all the building, all the background,

all the office furniture, everything is digital.

The background is a plate of New York,

New York skyline at the appropriate height

so that you can get the building tops

and the distant background.

Then you have another layer of closer buildings

that are more two-and-a-half-D, maybe not solid 3D,

and then you've got your building structure,

so the girders, the moyens,

all the glass, all the reflections

off all the internal glass, the plants,

the telephoness, the desks, every little section of glass

in that environment is digital.

To shoot it we had Chris Evan's act both parts

and then the moments where they were interacting

we had a body double, so you could get the contact moments,

you could get the true fight moments.

And then whenever the face of the body double was visible,

we can convincingly do face replacements,

so why not get your hero falling 30 feet in the air,

why not get your hero getting punched pretty hard.

We were able to do it.

So that sequence, it was a combination of Chris Evan's

shooting each side, and then

when he interacted, with the body double.

That is a full stunt, I wanna shout out to the stunts team

because they took some pretty hard falls smacking down

those stairs, so it was a really impressive stunt.

We were all pretty excited when Captain Marvel came out.

And when we knew we were gonna

get to work on this character.

Luckily we were standing on the shoulders

of the great effects team that came before us

so they had developed this really beautiful binary look

that we were able to just get in the hands of our vendors.

That development was happening as we were posting

so it was a little bit of us chasing them down the line,

but in the end I think I really love

where they landed with that look.

Her suit, every time you see it in the movie,

when she's in her full costume is digital.

Again the designs for those suits

were not ready in time for us to photograph Brie

so when you saw her at the beginning

as she's rescuing Tony Stark.

When you see her come back, when she's talking to Nat

in the Avengers compound with Rocket and Nebula

and then in the final battle when she comes back

and saves the day, that's all the digital suit.

[humming]

[Scott groans]

[Jen] In our world for visual effects

we do want to try and get as much

practical as we possibly can.

Our supervisor made a bet with the line producer

that we would have to replace the rat

that appears when Scott Lang is coming back

from the Quantum Realm to San Francisco.

And Dan insisted that we could find a rat

that was trained that could actually behave on set

and our line producer was convinced that

we were gonna have to replace it.

For those of you who are curious, that is not a digital rat.

For all the things that we do, and for all the things

that we replace that is actually a practical acting rat,

I don't have his name, but he's really there.

Where'd he go?

Steve?

[Jen] The blip effect that we ended up calling it,

the sort of post-snap, people disappearing,

that was months of development

and it was supposed to be quiet,

it was supposed to be elegant,

a little bit of pain mixed in,

but the pain was really supposed to be felt by the audience

and their characters disappearing,

so we wanted to give that silence to the viewership.

I'm sorry.

[Jen] Capturing that, we did about

several months of development.

We just kept running sim after sim and landed on something

that the brothers really fell in love with.

Just running a lot of samples over several months

and finally getting to the look.

[phones buzzes]

The notion of having the characters reform on screen

did come up, but I think everybody could visualize

pretty clearly that that would just be a little too weird.

You don't really wanna see that

and much more powerful if it happens off-screen.

I

am

Iron Man.

[Jen] The Tony snap, that was challenging

in that we knew the emotional weight

that that was gonna carry.

We as our part in it had to take

a very back seat to that moment, to that performance,

so technically having the background in there

that was not a problem, but finding the right tone of

the tendrils of the Infinity Stones,

eating away at the suit as the suit is struggling

and fighting to protect Tony,

and you know in that moment that

he's not powerful enough to withstand

what's coming and to be able to portray that

in a very quiet visual way and be in the background

of what Robert was doing in that moment,

it took some time to get that right.

Be lucky to find a dry eye on that one.

We're gonna be okay.

You can rest now.

[Jen] I know it's gonna be really hard for me in my career

to top achieving a Thanos and a Smart Hulk.

I mean those characters for a visual effects person,

I mean those are pretty peak so I'm enormously proud

of the work that we did and of the vendors

who came to the table with their A game

and continually challenging each other

to just get better and better so that the fans

and the studio and everybody really got performances

from these characters that I think

will live on in history pretty significantly.

Avengers

assemble.

[shouting]

[triumphant music]