The only chance we've got.

♪ I want to rock right now ♪

[Hank] Is both of you.

♪ I want to rock right now ♪

[Ant-Man] Ant-Man and the Wasp, teaming up.

[The Wasp] Follow my lead.

I'm Danielle Costa.

I'm the VP of visual effects for Marvel Studioses.

I work on all the movies that we have

currently in production,

helping guide the visual effects teams

and help them as needed for all the films

we have in production.

I've been at Marvel Studioses since 2009.

I started on Thor one.

(dramatic music)

And then worked on Avengers.

And have subsequently worked on every film

we've made since then.

(thudding)

This, I think is a really beloved character, Ant-Man,

and what was really cool about this particular movie

it's the first time a female heroine

got her name in the title of the film, the Wasp.

As much as this movie is about Ant-Man

I think personally, it's also about the Wasp as well.

She really came to life in a totally different way

and we saw a whole nother side of Hope van Dyne in this film

than we had in the first film.

Originally they had come up with a design

that was a little bit more like a dragonfly.

Ultimately, we landed on something more techy

because it really had to feel

more reflective of something that could have been created

and something maybe less organic

than the dragonfly look had been.

The visual effects team always wants to be sort of, um,

the illusion that you don't know,

or kind of like a magician how you don't want it

to be an obvious trick.

You want people to be just swept away from the story

and everything that they're seeing is completely believable.

In a movie like this where you're going small,

where you're going large,

where you're integrating crazy live action photography

with crazy CG, it has to all feel

like it's working all in the same universe.

While it may seem to be easier to build visual effects

into plate photography, in a way it's actually

just as difficult as having a fully CG rendered shot.

Because you have to be able to convincingly integrate

live action photography with CG elements artfully

in a way that people will believe that it's all

in the same lighting condition

and they're not gonna challenge it.

[Janet] Eyes. (imitates snoring)

At the beginning of the film,

there's a scene that takes place in the 80s

when Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne are younger

and they are saying goodnight to their young daughter.

And little we do know that this is gonna be the last time

that young Hope is ever gonna see her mother

until, of course, the end of the movie.

We've shaved as many as 20, 30, 40 years of off actors

over the course of the Marvel cinematic history.

The technique of youngifying actors,

essentially what we do on set is we dot up

the actor's faces so that they have points of reference

for tracking and then resculpt and reshape the face

to make them seem younger.

(booming thud)

The kitchen restaurant scene is probably the first time

that we really see the Wasp in action

at her fullest capacity.

They pulled out the Fraser lenses

which can do infinite depth of field.

And a lot of the surfaces and a lot of the kitchen

environment was shot using this particular methodology.

A shot where one of the goons throws the knife at her,

so that was shot at a high frame rate

so that we could really take full effect

of the dramatic throw.

The stunt actor did the motion of throwing,

but in the end the knife itself is CG,

and of course her acrobatic maneuvering around the knife

is all CG as well.

(metallic thud)

Obviously the Wasp is CG when they're bashing

on the tomatoes and the tomatoes are exploding,

that, you know, table surface is CG,

or the extension of it is CG and the tomato is CG.

It was a really well put together blend

of live action seamlessly integrated with, um,

a CG environment and CG animation, CG characters.

The fight scene in the lobby,

it's the first time we see Ghost.

There would be a hero take on her performance,

but the visual effects facilities

would take all of the other takes

that were surrounding it

that weren't maybe the hero take used,

and use that to anticipate or follow

the actual solid version of Ghost.

For me personally, the reason why I love that scene so much

is the first we get to see Wasp being

the totally badass that she is.

(dramatic music)

The interior of the lab was built on a sound stage

in Atlanta, which is where principle photography happened.

AA batteries that had been scaled up

in the backgrounds to imagine that Hank

was fueling the entire lab off of these

tiny little AA batteries that he had blown up.

The good thing about ants is that

there's lots of reference about how they move,

how they walk, there's lots of photography

available online to know really how their movements work.

For example, there's a scene where

Dr. Bill Foster is surrounded by the ants

and he just acted that out as if they were there

and then Cinesite put the ants back in after that.

[Man] There it is, there's a breach.

What the?

(dramatic music)

[Danielle] There's a scene at the end of the movie

where Ant-Man needs to follow the bad guy

to go get the lab that he had stolen,

so he goes out into the bay.

[Ant-Man] Hey, that doesn't belong.

He's using so much energy as giant man

that he can barely keep himself together,

and then he falls back into the water

and it's a comic scene, it's really funny.

I think that scene from a story point of view

is really important, a lot of that scene

ended up getting replaced digitally

just to make it feel as integrated as possible.

So some of the water that he interacts with is replaced.

The skies are all replaced.

He's a full CG character.

In reality, if you've ever been swimming in the Pacific

off of that California you know that

it's a very murky type of water.

It's not like the Caribbean, you can't see very far.

And so I think they did a good job at showing

how murky it was, I think if it was true to form

you probably wouldn't have seen anything.

But what I think is funny about that particular shot

is how much detail that they built,

how much of the bay they built,

how much of his suit, and how much the rendered

in all of that, and then in the end

they kind of did a wash, deleting all of that great details

because you wanted to give it the realistic quality

of feeling like the murky Pacific Ocean

that's outside of San Francisco.

The important thing when Scott is big or when he's small,

to keep in mind is to make sure that his movement

and his animation reflects the scale that he's at.

It adds to the feeling of a ginormous character,

and when they're tiny like an insect

they can get around and move quicker.

When the animation teams tackle

either giant man or Ant-Man they have to keep in mind

not just scaling their movements in space

but also to scale their movements in terms of time.

(engine revving)

This is the scene were Louis is traveling

through the streets of San Francisco

and he gets shrunk to Matchbox size.

The shot where he's coming down the street

is one of the few shots in the film

where we actually did use a Fraser lens on a car

and rolled it along the edge of the street

to get the background plate reference that we needed

so that we could feel that the street surface was

actually Ant-Man size and that you as an audience

member had gone to Ant-Man size as well.

(dramatic music)

In the case of the dive into the quantum realm

you have to convincingly show in a photorealistic way

a dimension that of course one could never

experience in real life.

The teams took great care to figure out

all the different levels of the quantum layer.

So first you go through a bacterial level,

which we called the tardigrade level, internally.

The thing about the tardigrade level

is that there is reference for that in the real world.

We are able to do microbial probes

in the bacterial level, and we do have a sense

of what those things look like,

where you can see these big shapes of tardigrades

surrounding Hank and his pod.

You never said it was so beautiful, (mumbles)

[Danielle] So in this scene, Hank has just arrived

at the most sub-subatomic level of the quantum realm.

And he's starting to explore

what this crazy world looks like.

He's just arrived, he's disoriented to a degree.

And he's trying to get his bearings,

and he's very hopeful that he's gonna find

his wife Janet down here.

The textures of the quantum realm were animated

using prismatic light spectrum

and they got a lot of inspiration from coral reefs,

and various electron miscroscopy.

I think they looked at virus microscopy

and saw what the vibrant colors could be from there

and built it into a moving plane of textures.

And then they applied that texture

on a moving and fragmented topography.

You're meant to feel uncomfortable to a degree

about this crazy landscape and this wacky world.

(screaming)

I still feel like we're continuing to improve,

be better, the feeling around the office

is how can we be better,

how can we tell better stories,

how can our visual effects be the best

visual effects in the world?

I love my job.

I would never want to do anything else

or work anywhere else.

(dramatic music) ♪ I wanna rock right now ♪

♪ I wanna to rock right now ♪

We're gonna die, I don't wanna die.

We didn't die!

Hey, what'd I miss?