See the Visual Effects That Brought Avengers: Endgame to Life
Released on 09/11/2019
[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]
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