Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/552848
j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 5 c g w 1 7 Lola provided de-aging. Double Negative artists handled a helicopter sequence. Method artists created shots in which a tiny Scott Lang forms a bond with an ant he named Anthony. (In the film, Ant-Man can communicate with the insects.) Method also assem- bled backgrounds, particularly for scenes in which Ant-Man is insect-size. "We tiled stills from macro photography to build the envi- ronments," says Director Peyton Reed. "The environments are virtual, but they're made from real photography. If we framed Ant-Man in a medium shot, he could look huge, so we had to use perspective, light, and shallow depth of field to keep him small." Creating a smaller-than-in- sect Ant-Man was the biggest challenge for artists at ILM. Led by Supervisor Russell Earl, the team needed to shrink a CG Ant-Man into what they call a "microverse." In all, ILM took charge of four main sequenc- es: an Ant-Man vs. Falcon fight, a series of shots in which carpenter ants paratroop out of a plane, the final battle with Yel- low Jacket, and the microverse in the grand finale. Of those, the microverse was most unusual. S M A L L W O R L D Moviegoers discovered the Falcon in Marvel's 2014 film Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Actor Anthony Mackie returned to the screen to play Falcon for a brief fight with Ant- Man in this film. "We worked with our London team on the scene," Earl says. "Every time I see the sequence, I smile, knowing how terrified Tony Mackie was on the wires." During the fight, the half- inch-tall CG Ant-Man punches the full-size Falcon. "That was the hardest thing about the fight," Harrington says. "The camera is moving quickly, he's small, and every- thing is motion-blurred. So we tried to give him a super-nice silhouette for the anticipating punch and when he rockets forward. With a clean silhouette against a white background, you can see the action pose even though he's small. And, we put a little extra spec [specular highlights] on him." Ant-Man wins the fight by crawling into the Falcon's backpack, where he pulls wires from the circuit boards and causes that superhero's wings to malfunction. In that sequence, and usually through the film, Ant-Man shrinks to about a half-inch tall. He's warned not to shrink too far, however, and uses a regulator on his belt to control his size. That is, until he fights the villainous Yel- low Jacket toward the end of the film and throws caution aside. Yellow Jacket's backpack is made of titanium; Ant-Man's ant-sized body can't get in. The fight begins as a physical fight on set with a stunt actor playing Yellow Jacket. ILM art- ists replaced the actor with a CG character. "When possible, we matched the actor in the plate," Har- rington says. "For pick-up shots that weren't in the plate or ones we needed to create from scratch, we did motion capture here at ILM. For the CG Ant-Man, the animators came up with a signature fighting move. "He reels back, and when he punches, he puts his whole body into it," Harrington says. "He hits these poses that look like they're out of 'How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.' " But to win the fight, Ant-Man decides to shrink small enough to pass through the titanium. "The challenge for us was that unlike most sequences in which he stays one size, in this scene, he continuously shrinks," Harrington says. "What does that look like? We decided that if someone shrank nonstop, he would have the sense of falling. So we gave him a skydiving aspect as he fell through the backpack and ripped stuff apart." P E S T R E M O V A L Yellow Jacket has shrinking technology similar to Ant-Man's, and when our hero pulls tech- nology in the villain's backpack apart, it causes the CG Yellow Jacket to shrink in on himself. "We created a spectacular death for him in which one limb shrinks at a time, he caves in, and collapses in on himself," Harrington explains. For reference, the animators drew inspiration from the house that collapses in on itself during the film Poltergeist, and put the animators in motion-capture suits to act out the sequence. "We had an animator who was working on the shot contort and act like the suit was mal- functioning, to get the move- ment of a skeleton in place," Harrington says. "We knew something would pop or explode on Yellow Jacket's back and the villain would try to stop it. So the SIZING UP THE SCALE Sizing up and down would be more accurate. As Ant-Man shrinks, it was important that the audience would immedi- ately understand how small he was. "One way to tell the story that he's shrinking was to grow the environment around him," says Harrington. "Since he's the object that's shrinking, he shrinks by his center of mass, which means the world would grow from that point outward. So, in some shots, he's in the center of the frame and the world grows like a kaleidoscope around him." FEAR IN HIS EYES As Ant-Man shrinks toward nothingness, Actor Paul Rudd conveys the emotion the character might have felt, and the visual effects crew applied those facial expressions to the CG character. "We did 'U-cap' with Paul Rudd," says Harrington. "We sat him in a chair and had cameras around him at different angles to capture a library of generic expressions we could use. There are a lot of close-ups in the 'microverse' sequence; we tell the story through his eyes. At one point, he closes his eyes because he believes he will die." The ILM crew added the expressions by projecting the photographic images onto the geometry of the CG charac- ter's helmet.