Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/40055
[ ] the full scene with Chris Evans and all the other actors," explains Townsend.Then for reference they reshot the scene with Evan's "skinny Steve" body double, Leander Denny, mimicking pre- cisely what Evans had done.A third pass was done with both actors absent from the scene, and some- times a forth pass with a greenscreen placed behind Chris Evans was shot to have the character as a sepa- rate element. From those raw plates Lola used three different techniques to generate the effect. For the majority of the shots, they rotoscoped Chris Evans — separating him completely from the background plate, then ble's face."So instead of replacing his whole head it's a way of replacing just the facial features while main- taining Chris Evans performance." Out of roughly 270 "skinny Steve" shots, notes Williams,"We did seven or eight face projections, probably 25 head replacements and then the rest were Chris Evans' slimming down." "We do all our compositing in Autodesk Flame. Lola has 21 Flames now; it's got the richest toolsets," says Edson.With the Flame they had the power to scrub a full 2K plate and watch the shape track with the image and "chew through the really complex shots. For 3D tracking we use PFTrack, and for all our 3D elements we use Maya 2011." stretch, fold and react when making contact with the ground.The Senate created 167 shots overall. Method Studios completed 28 shots on the movie, including making a digital double for Evans' jump out of an airplane over enemy lines. CG flak ex- plosions, tracers and clouds were generated in Hou- dini and rendered through Mantra.The digital Captain America costume was built using NCloth, and the en- tire digital double was rendered through V-Ray out of Maya. Shots were composited using Nuke and Flame. According to VFX supervisor Faden,"What was unique about this project was that we were matching a period effects look.We had fun researching and matching authentic flak and tracers from rare color WWII footage.The overall look was to be real but subdued. Another challenge was to translate the gim- bal/camera work from the stage into a believable plane motion.This often involved reducing the gimbal motion relative to the outside greenscreen and includ- ing CG clouds and jetstreams rendered outside the plane to contribute to the overall sense of speed." Look VFX did around 65 shots, three main se- quences, with a 15-person crew in about six weeks. To make the car "float" more in the Stark floating car scene, Look first removed the rig under the car that raised and lowered the car. In one section they re- moved the car entirely, rotoscoped out the actors and built a clean backplate without the car. Then on a new CG model of the car they used the actual car photography, mapped it on to the model, then ani- mated the new car so it had that floating feeling. The major sequence was the montage section."It's A majority of the post took place at Marvel Studios' facility at Raleigh Studios. shrank him down and put him back into the scene using the original plate plus clean plate elements around the shorter Evans."That was the first choice from production.They wanted all of Chris's perfor- mance, including his body, his face, everything. It was really important to them to maintain the original per- formance of Chris Evans," says Williams. "In shots where we couldn't shrink Chris down we had two techniques. One was a head replacement, where we would take Chris Evans head, we'd reduce the mass of it and then put it on his 'skinny Steve' body double." The last technique used the Lola Face Re-projec- tion Rig pioneered in The Social Network to create the Winklevoss twins. Evans sits stationary surrounded by four cameras. Computer-controlled lighting changes around him to mimic the lighting in the principal pho- tography. "So if he's sitting and he looks toward the sun and looks back towards the camera when we shoot him he'll be stationary but we'd move the lights around him to look like he looked toward the sun and back," describes Edson. Footage from those four cameras was then pro- jected onto a 3D model of Evan's face and that 3D projection sat like a hockey mask on Evan's body dou- MORE VFX The Senate used Autodesk's Maya,The Foundry's Nuke and Adobe Photoshop to build and comp multi- ple set extensions and augmented crowd scenes for a number of key sequences.This included the Kruger Chase, turning 2011 Manchester, England into 1940s Brooklyn, New York, and the USO performance scene, where multiple small crowd plates were layered to- gether to emulate the scale of Radio City Music Hall. They used 3D projections of digital matte paintings en- hanced with CG elements such as cars and architec- tural details, including the Brooklyn Bridge and people from bluescreen shoots from other films in the archives. "The most challenging thing" says VFX supervisor Richard Higham "was the number of different angles each street view had in the sequence — making sure that each extension was consistent to previous shots. Being true to the perspective of the live ac- tion in the foreground, as well as being visually differ- ent enough to allow for the illusion that we are rushing through many streets, not just the two or three from the shoot." They also had to replace Chris Evan's feet in a scene where he runs barefoot chasing a bad guy. Evan's flesh colored shoes had to be precisely re- placed with anatomically correct CG feet complete with wiggling toes, flexing muscles and skin that could Captain American fighting his way across Europe blowing up buildings with his squad," says Ivins. One element had Evans on motorcycle jumping out of a building just before it explodes.That was shot in re- verse on greenscreen. Look integrated the Captain America element into a plate of a real building that special effects blew up in Eastern Europe."That was a pretty challenging sequence because every shot was different," says Ivins. The last sequence they did was the Captain America fight scene just before Red Skull soldiers with flamethrowers capture him. Shot in the rolling hills and oaks trees of southern California, Look suc- cessfully turned those shots into the Ardennes for- est and built and then animated all of Captain Amer- ica's CG shields. Look used Maya, Flame, Nuke and After Effects. MIXING & AUDIO POST When the time came to do final sound mixing and audio post, the entire post enterprise, people and all the technology moved from Marvel Studios to Todd- AO West studios, says Kiran Pagglegadda.Todd-AO even converted two dub stages into color timing suites for E-film to set up a remote grading facility for the 2D and 3D digital intermediates. [EDITOR'S NOTE:There are many more visual ef- fects stories to be told but not enough space to do it. Please visit www.postmagazine.com for info on other VFX companies and their contributions to Captain America:The First Avenger.] www.postmagazine.com August 2011 • Post 47 A C I R E M A N I A T P A C cont. from 18