Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1501110
www.postmagazine.com 17 POST MAY/JUNE 2023 P eter Quill (Chris Pratt), also known as Star-Lord, must bravely rally his team to defend the universe and save the life of one of their own in Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, written and directed by James Gunn. Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), Drax (Dave Bautista), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Mantis (Pom Klementieff), Kraglin (Sean Gunn) and Cosmo (voiced by Maria Bakalova) round out the roster of Guardians in this thrilling new interstellar adventure. As the group settles into their new headquarters, and Quill mourns the loss of his beloved fellow Guardian, Gamora (Zoe Saldana), they are viciously attacked by a warrior known as Adam Warlock (Will Poulter). Rocket is critically injured, and the Guardians are unable to heal his wounds due to a kill switch embedded in his body. They trace the device's origin to Orgocorp, a powerful company led by the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji) — a malicious geneticist with a god complex. Orgocorp cruelly experimented on Rocket when he was a baby raccoon, using him as a test subject for a project that anthropomorphized animals to populate a utopian society. The Guardians devise a plan to infiltrate the company's massive Arête Laboratories research complex to retrieve the over- ride code that will save Rocket's life. Assembling a team The story of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is brought to life by a tremendous amount of visual effects artistry, seamlessly interwoven with stellar set pieces and practical effects elements. Wētā FX and Framestore led the charge as the project's main VFX vendors, with Sony Pictures Imageworks and ILM also contributing. Delivering 671 total VFX shots, Wētā's achieve- ments on the project included creating and de- stroying the colossal Arête Laboratories structure, leading the epic interstellar battle sequences in the third act and collaborating with other vendors on key character work. Two leading members of the Wētā team were overall VFX supervisor Guy Williams and animation supervisor Michael Cozens, who recently collabo- rated with James Gunn on Peacemaker [2022] and The Suicide Squad [2017]. Gunn also tapped the talents of the Wētā team for 2017's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Williams and Cozens were eager to collabo- rate with Gunn on another Guardians installment, thanks to his knack for bringing an engaging narra- tive from the page to the screen. "James is a fantastic writer," Williams states. "We loved the script the second we saw it." Cozens adds, "James is a force of nature, and he is such a sharp mind in terms of storytelling and vision." As a director, Gunn took a very hands-on, collab- orative approach to planning and problem solving. "He's happy to get down in the weeds with you and figure out a shot problem," Cozens recalls. "There's a lot of really tricky work in the film — a lot of big shots to make and complex challenges to solve. But he makes that process really fun." Williams adds, "I love James' sense of humor. He's a really good filmmaker in that he knows what he wants, and he can achieve it. When it's some- thing that's as quirky and as fun as what he does with his films, it's just a joy to work on." Laying the groundwork With so many daunting VFX tasks to tackle, it was vital for the Wētā team to form an actionable gameplan and a solid workflow. "We didn't have a single process that we were doing on the show," Williams explains. "Our work had a lot of range, so we'd set up a lot of little tiger teams to go off and start solving individual aspects of the show. "One of the fun things when you start on a proj- ect is seeing all the artwork and the breakdowns and all that kind of stuff come through," he contin- ues. "Stephane Ceretti, the concept visual effects supervisor, was fantastic to work with." It was essential to establish clear lines of commu- nication with the other departments on the project. "The scope of the work was very broad," Cozens recalls. "We had to jump into it almost in front of a lot of other departments in order to figure out what problems needed to be solved." The team assigned a supervisor to each major VFX sequence. "Each one of those problems had to be solved," Williams notes. "Each had its own different sets of challenges and solutions." Planning for the large-scale battle in the film's final act required an extraordinary amount of coor- dination from all sides. "We typically do third-act battles for Marvel," Williams notes. "The amount of effects work we had to do on this particular movie was so daunt- ing that, for the first time that I've ever done it, we elevated that to one of our main concerns." Williams notified all of the relevant departments about the magnitude of the sequence. "They were going to have to ramp up to sizes that were incredibly significant." Crafting a colossal structure Wētā took on the massive task of being the sole vendor to build the Arête Laboratories, a colossal, ruby-red research complex located on Counter- Earth. The Arête first appears as a skyscraper towering 300 meters above the surrounding city, a utopian metropolis populated by the High Evolutionary's experimental 'humanimal' hybrids. The city, also built by Wētā, is based loosely on Seattle and features a large downtown area, a waterfront district, a harbor and an office park surrounded by large waterfalls. The Arête is later revealed to be a gigantic craft measuring 3.5 kilometers across. "At first, you just think it's this elaborate, over- the-top, pyramid-style office building, but then you realize it's a giant space station or spaceship," Williams explains. When the spacecraft lifts off, it triggers large- scale destruction on Counter-Earth. These se- quences required both effects and matte paintings to achieve. The gigantic craft contains several sig- nificant sub-environments, including a command deck, a pilot bay, a space port and a hall that is the center of a key fight sequence. The Wētā team procedurally generated the layout for the Arête's structure, which measured approxi- mately 24 square miles — roughly the equivalent of a third of the area of Washington, DC. The structure build required a large amount of detail, as it was shown closely from many differ- ent angles. "We knew it was going to be challenging," Williams explains. "It's not just full-frame all the time. There's a lot of action that takes place with a camera within a hundred feet of the ship, which means that you're seeing details that are less than a percentage point the size of the surface area." It would have been prohibitively costly and time consuming to model the structure with such a high level of minute detail. Director James Gunn on the set of the new Marvel film.