Still one of the more impressive movie FX jobs of the year has to be Marvel Studio’s Avengers: Endgame, which probably made part of its $2.8 billion worldwide from the people who had to keep going back to theaters again and again to pick up on some of the smaller intricacies, but more importantly, to rewatch that amazing final battle scene one more time.
It’s become fairly common for FX houses on these big movies to put together reels that show off what the thousands and thousands of CG artists and animators put into making those amazing scenes come to life, often creating thousands of CG characters that couldn’t possibly fit on a soundstage.
(NOTE: If you’re one of the five people who hasn’t seen Avengers: Endgame, 1.) thanks for being an avid enough Beat reader to click on the link anyway; and 2.) don’t ruin the movie for yourself by watching the video since it does give away some of the movies big moments i.e. SPOILERS!)
What’s nice about the new FX reel from Weta Digital for its work on Avengers: Endgame (which you can watch below) is that there are a number of great scenes where you can see exactly who was on the green screen set on the day of shooting and what exactly was happening. For instance, we see a scene of Elizabeth Olsen‘s Scarlet Witch floating into view as Tessa Thompson‘s Valkyrie and other Asgardians emerge from Doctor Strange’s signature portals. The real money shot has to be when Chris Evans‘ Captain America says “Avengers Assemble” and we get to see which actors were actually on set for that key moment. (For instance, you’ll notice that Mark Ruffalo wasn’t on set even doing performance capture and his Hulk was fully CG.)
It’s also fun to watch the Thor-Captain America-Iron Man mini-battle with Thanos and to see that either the actors or their stunt doubles were definitely involved on set, but yeah, a lot of the stuff in that giant battle… well, none of that stuff really exists.
It’s still too early to tell whether Avengers: Endgame will be in the Oscar conversation on the same level as Black Panther was last year, but it’s hard to imagine it’s not the frontrunner in at least the Visual FX and maybe some other technical categories at this point.
