Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/691968
m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 6 c g w 2 1 THE AIRPORT BATTLE IS A KEY SEQUENCE IN THE FILM AND WAS ONE OF THE MOST CHALLENGING. as the films progressed. That's something we went back and looked at and said, 'That was a better-looking shield,' so we ended up re- placing the shield with a more brushed-metal feel to recapture what we had in Captain America: The First Avenger. In terms of technology, has it improved? I think it's something that allows us to stage a bigger and bigger spectacle as we proceed. We had just under 3,000 visual effects shots in Civil War, and a lot of the shots are the spectacle shots in the airport. But in addition, we have the hidden shots we try to make as seamless as possible. Would you say there were any major overhauls in the pipeline, moving from production into post and with the visual effects? On Winter Soldier, working with ILM, one of the bigger things they had to deal with to move things through the pipeline were the three Helicarriers that were based on the Helicarrier from The Avengers. That model was very heavy, and they had to deal with three of them for Winter Soldier. So they had to push three Helicarriers through their render pipeline. Then, when we got to this [film], we modeled the en- tire Leipzig airport, which made the Helicarriers look paltry by compari- son. So I think our moving forward and looking to the things we wanted to create, was pushing and creating environments and creating worlds that allow amazing amounts of details through the pipeline. Isn't there an age regression scene in the film featuring the Tony Stark character? Yes, there's the shot of young Tony, which is about a 4,000-frame shot, where we took Robert Downey Jr. and made him about 23 years old for the length of the shot. And that was one of those shots that, normally, if it was done in cuts, you could break it up and spread it over multiple artists to finish each individual shot in a simpler way. But with the Russos, they wanted the scene to feel a little bit off when you first see it. They wanted to do it as a single shot rather than as multiple shots. So Tony wakes up on the couch, and he's a little farther away from the camera, and has a conversation with his mother. When she leaves, present-day Tony Stark shows up in the background. In addition to it being a very long shot with the de-aging, it was also something that was shot in multiple passes. It was shot in a house just outside of Atlanta, and there was no way to get big motion-control equipment in there; the space was just too small. So we just married the two pieces together in addition to doing the age regression. That took quite a bit of time because you want to define what made a young Tony Stark. Would you say that the age regression scene and the airport battle are two of the more prominent scenes in the film? Yes, we wanted a large feel and scope to the film. The opening of the movie [takes place in Lagos, Nigeria] but was actually shot in Atlanta, and we needed to make it look like Lagos. There were some things we definitely had hopes of filming in Africa, but we weren't able to go because the Ebola outbreak was happening in Africa at the time. So, we went to Puerto Rico, since it is a coastal city like Lagos, and a lot of the architecture worked out fairly well. But in terms of shooting time, we were not able to shoot in Puerto Rico. So, we went down there with an effects unit, shooting many plates – aerial plates, drone plates, scans, surveys, and then shot plates off a camera truck – all to make the initial fight. We kept the foreground pieces of Atlanta and replaced all the background pieces to make it look like Lagos. A large challenge of the film was make Atlanta not look like Atlanta (laughs). But in terms of scope, the final battle, probably the biggest battle [in the film], was handled by ILM, and the finale with Cap facing off with Iron Man was completed by Method Stu- dios. It's a very interesting tonal shi between the scope of the battle with all the heroes fighting and then getting into a more intimate fight at the end where it became all about the powers, the thought process, and the friendship falling apart between the two characters.