How Marvel Built the VFX in Ant-Man and the Wasp
Released on 10/16/2018
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?
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