For most of the members of the Oscar-nominated “Avengers: Endgame” visual effects team, this hasn’t just been a two-film adventure. In fact, most of the artists also worked on “Captain America: Civil War,” “Captain America: Winter Soldier” or “Iron Man 3.” So, imagine spending close to an entire decade working on these iconic characters. When it finally came to the climactic scene where a legion of heroes arrives to help take out the villainous Thanos, they knew it had to be something special.
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“We got to do that shot,” Matt Aitkin, WETA Digital VFX Supervisor says. “And yeah, there were technical challenges in pulling it off, but also there was a sense of a huge responsibility because even just reading that page in the script, you knew that that whole sequence had the potential to play huge. Like it’s just, it’s the payoff for the ‘Infinity Saga.’ You know, this has been an all, it all comes home to roost.”
It turns out the shot is completely done in CG. There are no actors against green screen composited within it. And that meant WETA animated 47 individual MCU heroes as digital doubles in that frame. And, of course, there were numerous iterations with one here there, another somewhere else, flipped and back again.
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“One of our animation supervisors owned that particular task. And what you might not realize is going on there was that from shot to shot, the Wakanda portal and the Contraxia portal, maybe changing their position relative to each other a little bit,” Aitkin says. “Maybe ones going to be a little bit bigger, maybe ones going to be a little bit smaller. We were kind of framing things up for the camera in each shot so that they play to their fullest strengths. So, there’s actually a different arrangement of portals, subtly different arrangement of portals in every shot, but they need to all feel like they’re the same. It needs to feel like there’s a consistency, and so long as it feels like they’re consistent, then that’s all that really matters.”
While the entire team had worked on the previous film, “Avengers: Infinity War,” there were still new challenges audience members weren’t expecting. ILM VFX Supervisor Russell Earl noted how difficult Smart Hulk (or Professor Hulk to some) was to pull off. Partially because this version of the Hulk needed to reflect star Mark Ruffalo even more than the previous iteration. Early notes, “We were able to capture Mark’s performance and have him be able to hold his own on, on-screen in the same way Thanos did with the other live-action characters and I think that was a big thing.”
Frankly, that was just the beginning of their workload. Earl notes, “This film is packed with digital environments, digital characters, de-aging, old-aging. We’re going into the quantum realm and there’s just so many things that it’s all these, mass explosions, water work. There’s such a variety of things that I don’t think we could have achieved in the time we had without having had the prior films under our belt. We had [that] luxury…so that when we got to ‘Endgame’ we were able to really hit the ground running. We had our systems up and in place and it allowed us to just put more time than we normally would’ve had into getting the shots under the screen.”
“Endgame” also finds the Avengers going back in time to previous MCU films, including the first “Avengers” film and the infamous Battle of New York. While that picture hit theaters just seven years before, there were still significant advancements in muscle systems or rendering looks. Quality control dictated that even though it was the “past” it was “always fixed to make better.”
“From an artist’s standpoint, it’s frustrating to bring back a character from five, six years ago, even a year ago with the newer toolset that you have,” Early admits. “It’s just in our nature to always want to make things better.”
Aitken says, “From an audience point of view, they’re not even aware that it’s changed, because these characters need to be recognizable and instantly recognizable. But you just want them to be bitchin’ I suppose.”
“Avengers: Endgame” is available for digital download and on Disney Plus.