Out of This World

The third chapter of the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy offers a dazzling array of state-of-the-art digital effects.

- By Trevor Hogg -

Fans of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy were thrilled to discover that this summer’s third outing of their favorite band of comic-book misfits was as entertaining and engrossing as the previous chapters. In the threequel, a mad scientist wants to get back his genetically modified test subject, which leads to Rocket Racoon to be at the center of a rescue operation resulting in some danceable cosmic chaos.

Aiding director James Gunn on the visual effects front were previous collaborators Stephane Ceretti, Marvel Entertainment VFX supervisor, and Guy Williams, Wētā FX VFX supervisor, with the latter responsible for over 600 shots that feature a spaceship the size of a city and a single camera hallway fight where 18 shots had to be stitched together.

“In true Marvel fashion, they concepted everything,” says Williams. “We had a lot of good postviz to go from which had been directed by James Gunn and Stephane Ceretti. The design work that we got on the things we needed to build was spot on. There wasn’t a lot of guess- work or ‘I changed my mind’ after the fact. James runs an efficient ship and Stephane understands to steer us in a direction but not tell us exactly what street to go down. His notes were fantastic. The other thing is that Stephane has a great eye. He has a good sense of color, contrast and composition.”

Building a Super Spaceship

One of the feature’s massive builds was the Arête Laboratories situated in the harbor of Counter Earth which appears to be a 980-foothigh skyscraper but is in fact a submerged spaceship that is about 11.5 feet wide.

“It’s like a cube [made of red glass and metal] with a cube in every corner and a belt in the middle,” explains Williams. “We knew as soon as we looked at the artwork that scale was going to be the challenge. You don’t want it to feel simple. You need to feel the enormity of it. The other thing is you need to have a lot of detail in it because there are times where we are literally five feet away from the ship, and there are times where you are seeing the whole thing.”

Even though path tracing has long since solved reflections and refractions, cheats had to be implemented for the ruby glass, which had a thin metallic coat. “Ruby has a high IOR [Index of Reflection],” observes Williams. “That means light doesn’t make it back out which meant getting a lot of black forms appearing all over the Arête.”

The procedural architectural generator CityBuilder was responsible for the layout and dressing of the 24 square miles on the structural surface. “We had different levels of geometry that we instanced. We had stuff that was almost the size of a building and others that were simple pipes or vents so that every building didn’t look the same.”

There were three different layers of instancing. “We tried to make it look as clean as possible,” says the VFX supervisor. “The logic that we always had was there were always little robots going across the surface cleaning it. We always joked that we would show one in a shot but never got around to it!”

The spaceship gets progressively destroyed

“We were constantly proposing new re-speeds to editor Fred Raskin because he was trying to fit the action to land on the musical beats. Even in his scripts, James is calling out the songs that are playing; he’s hearing that music in his head as he’s writing the movie. It’s insane!” upon lifting off. “You have to take this thing that is a house of cards just to get the thing built,” says Williams. “Now, you’re pulling cards away trying to make it look like it’s collapsing without the system underneath it collapsing. We had to break it into pieces and instance even more destruction behind those pieces. If you change the animation of where an explosion is then you have to re-instance the model and de-instance it in a different place. As much as any destruction is a large process this added a level of complexity.”

To create Counter Earth, which is a utilitarian version of Earth in the 1970s and 1980s which surrounds the Arête, the team used aerial-plate photography of Seattle. A large harbor, a downtown, waterfront district and an island office park surrounding the spaceship had to be constructed for this key backdrop. “We knew that we were going to go all CG anyway because we had to blow it up later, but the aerial reference gave us a great starting point,” remarks Williams. “We did a lot of like angles to make sure that our matte painting [a full 3D build] was matching up to it. James specifically wanted an almost concrete Brutalist architecture and not to have tall glass monoliths anywhere so we got rid of the more modern buildings and the Space Needle.”

The water for the harbor and the waterfront was done by the matte painting team.

However, it still had to be rendered to achieve the desired specular quality. “When the Arête goes to lift off, you find out that 90 percent of it is hidden below the surface and it digs a massive hole in the ground that then has to fill back in with water from the ocean,” explains Williams. “It was fortuitous that there were no wide establishers of the Arête lifting up. It was more about how Nebula, Mantis and Drax attempt to get onto the Arête. It was seen from the view of ground level 30 to 40 metres away from it.”

Altogether, 18 separate shots had to be stitched together to create an oner for the Arête hallway fight which lasts one and a half minutes. “We took an entire year on that shot,” reveals Williams. “All 18 shots were tracked and then gave to the animation team to try to figure out a smooth continuous move through the whole thing. We then broke back down into 18 cameras and treated them like 18 shots again.”

Modest Modifications

Williams mentions that no motion control cameras were utilized in the movie. “There were times where a character might wipe the foreground, but the camera has moved down the hallway by four feet so we had to push it back into position,” he says. “There is a stunt with Mantis jumping on a guy’s shoulders and flipping him; he was CG the whole time as was she. We really didn’t seek to modify anybody as much as possible. We wanted to stay as faithful to the photography as possible.”

Of course, since this was a Guardians adventure, music and re-speeds needed to be accommodated. “We ramped the action up and down in speed to accentuate a moment,” remarks Williams. “This hallway fight had a ton of that. That one-and-half minutes might only be one minute with 30 seconds of it slowed down by some factor. You have to figure out how long the total action is, re-speed it to the desired length, and then every time you change the respeed in or out point, you have to steal that time from somewhere else. Also, they choreographed the gunshots, punches and flips to lineup with the beats of the music. We were constantly proposing new re-speeds to editor Fred Raskin because he was trying to fit the action to land on the musical beats. Even in his scripts, James is calling out the songs that are playing; he’s hearing that music in his head as he’s writing the movie. It’s insane!” ◆

Disney present Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in theaters worldwide. The movie kicked off summer movie season with $118 million at the domestic box office, the second biggest debut of the year, after The Super Mario Bros. Movie.