Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1127068
www.postmagazine.com 21 POST MAY/JUNE 2019 SUMMER MOVIES Hulk's performance is very broad and his face very elastic, Thanos's face is intense yet subdued. "You're dealing with a really precise performance," says DeLeeuw, comparing Thanos and Smart Hulk. "There's not a lot of movement in [Thanos's] face." Nevertheless, the character's performance is crucial to the storytelling. In the final shots, Thanos does not speak, but it is clear what he is thinking based on his CG body language and facial expressions. Early in the film, Digital Domain again handled shots of Thanos, as it had for Infinity War, with Weta taking control of the character when he attacks the Avengers' compound well into the film and creating a few hundred Thanos shots for Endgame, building on the work it had done for Infinity War. In the short time between the two films, Weta continued to work on the character. According to Matt Aitken, VFX supervisor at Weta, the facility's facial modeling team created some new target shapes around the edges of the mouth. The team took advantage of new developments in Weta's facial animation pipeline, using Deep Shapes, which enables the animators to procedurally add more fine-level detail to the facial performance. "When Thanos's facial performance changes from one expression to the next, we're not changing either of those end points of that transition. They're still staying exactly the same. "Our facial animators have complete control over the shape of Thanos's face so we can control the facial performance at a very high level," says Aitken. "But, we wanted to add some complexity to that transition itself, so we're modeling a little bit of inertia." Here, Thanos is a bit younger, having come from four to five years in the past, and is more agile and powerful, requiring keyframe animators to dial in his movements on top of the motion captured from Brolin and the motion captured from a stunt per- former in the fight scenes during the end battle. STAGING THE FINAL BATTLE Endgame is filled with many impressive visual effects sequences, none more than the end battle, which brings back a plethora of characters who join in the fight to defeat Thanos. The past version of Thanos arrives, too, and attacks the compound with his warship. A battle of epic proportions ensues. Various heroes step in for the relay to carry the gauntlet to safety. "Going back to Civil War, we had about a dozen heroes running at each other and fighting in the big battle scene. In this one, we had hundreds of heroes and villains, and every Avenger using his or her powers at the same time. The complexity of the shots went through the roof!" says DeLeeuw, as a plethora of CG and live-action characters join in the fray. Weta built, and then destroyed, the CG com- pound, making sure set pieces could be moved to accommodate various camera angles. Weta also ILM built a number of characters, including Rocket. Nebula joins the fray. Tony Stark lost in space, a 3D environment.