Using mocap, practical sets, and rigorous previs, VFX supervisor Jake Morrison helped director Jake Schrier create complex, multi-character action, stunts, and combat with authenticity and detail, using as much real footage as possible, in the latest Marvel Studios action adventure.
In Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, seen as the “Suicide Squad” of the MCU, Bucky Barnes, Yelena Belova, John Walker, Alexei Shostakov, Ava Starr, and Antonia Dreykov are initially meant to kill each other. They survive – except Antonia - to form an ad hoc group that must contain an amnesiac man named Robert “Bob” Reynolds, aka Sentry / The Void, who has the ability to warp reality, teleport, and project energy.
The film enjoys an all-star ensemble cast led by Florence Pugh, Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell, Olga Kurylenko, Lewis Pullman, Hannah John-Kamen, David Harbour and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Now available on Digital, the film hits Disney+ on August 27.
The Two Jakes, director Jake Schreier and Marvel Studios’ Visual Effects Supervisor Jake Morrison, partnered with ILM, Framestore, Digital Domain, Rising Sun Pictures, Raynault VFX, Base FX, Crafty Apes, and Mammal Studios to create 1,600 visual effects shots that focused on being grounded rather than spectacular, using as many practical sets and footage as possible.
“When you’re doing something that involves a superhuman or superhero who has a new power, there is no way that the audience can tell you it’s wrong,” notes Morrison. “But if we have David Harbour throwing Florence Pugh across the street, the mandate for that would be the antithesis of someone like Spider-Man, where you do the parkour and the dance around. The note would be, ‘Make it look like we did it for real.’ Every single time. That’s much harder because a six-year-old can tell you that the visual effects look bad but not how to fix it. You instinctively know.”
In the film’s opening shot, Florence Pugh attempts to top Tom Cruise by jumping off of Merdeka 118, the second-tallest building in the world, located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “The stunt rig that they built on the roof had an immense number of trusses,” Morrison shares. “Florence was tied basically with four Tech Safety Lines, which are extremely strong wires, in a harness, sitting at the edge of a 2500-foot drop, literally getting up, acting with the camera swinging around, stepping off, dropping about 20 feet, then getting back up to do it again. She did it maybe eight times. It’s extraordinary. There was a ton of reconstruction work. We were fixing skies, taking care of the trusses and building an extra level on top of the building for all the stunt rigging. You’re also taking all of the drone photography, and the photogrammetry that was shot after we left. All of the solar panels you see behind her are CG. But she did the stunts and the bones are all there.”
Even for the surreal sequence where members of the Thunderbolts find themselves navigating through the various rooms inside Bob’s mind, Schreier relied on practical rather than digital solutions. “In one shot, Florence runs through a forest box set, which is one of the trauma rooms,” recalls Morrison. “There’s a section of the wall that the special effects department had cut out of the plywood set and replaced it with Gypsnow [plaster made from powdered gypsum] that disintegrates into dust the minute it hits a subject but has a really beautiful lingering vector to it. That’s got a X on it. Florence literally runs full pelt into the wall and goes through it. We had a camera-based golf cart capturing her going through the wall. The following day we go to the next set for what is supposed to be the seamless transition of Florence running through the wall and doing a 90-degree tilt as she drops down, and the gravity shifts to the next scene where she’s doing the Red Room training as a kid with all of the child assassins. We remove the tape, had the stunt player on wires and bags of Gypsnow rigged right next to them on a line. Our stunt player drops, all of the bags open up, and the camera operator is on the wheel literally doing the full 90-degree spin live on the table. We had our editors onset literally taking what we just shot and stitching it into the Avid to make sure that scene transition actually worked.”
The vault sequence where the future members of the Thunderbolts fight one another was complicated to execute. “When you have a fight with four or five people who are coming in at different angles, every time you introduce a new character you do a line cross you need to choose,” explains Morrison. “It was one of the things we rehearsed the hell out of. We did stuntvis, which gave us the overall choreography. Then my producer, Bryan Searing, had the bright idea of putting our stunt players in a couple of mocap suits belonging to our previs company. Jake came in with the DP at that stage and shot and blocked every piece of this fight that we had as an animatic. Jake took all of that footage and cut the entire thing. We had the mocap at that stage and gave it all to our previs company, who cleaned it up. Then we gave them Jake’s edit. They recreated shot by shot everything Jake had captured on his iPhone but with the stunt mocap in the correct art department environment. It’s spooky when you look at the finished product; it’s not 1:1 but 5:1. It’s damn close. We had to do tons of stunt enhancement by pushing the fists and arms closer so you actually get a connection point.”
In the film, cars have a habit of getting flipped, like with the desert convey scene. “The deal with that was to avoid CG as much as possible,” states Morrison. “Anything we were going to takeover or enhance we would take that ethic and plus something. We’re down in Utah near a place called Green River. We’re in the middle of utter desolation and found one long road that was four or five miles long that we could dress. With the limo there was a cylinder about two feet tall and a foot in diameter. The entire structure of the limo had to be reenforced to make sure that it held together. At the moment of the stunt, a person hits a button, and it fires the cylinder down like an enormous bullet. We took the limo as far as we possibly could and then did a takeover. You could have done the Hummer and limo flip in CG, but they would not have had that real resonance of feeling like it was true.”
For the interior limo scene where the characters talk to each other, there was discussion about shooting on a soundstage with LED screens in Atlanta. According to Morrison, “We could send a unit out to shoot 360 driving plates, put those on the LED screens, and shoot the whole thing in a controlled environment. The vehicle shoot where you’re towing a vehicle with a camera car using hard mounts on the side to attach your cameras is something we’ve been doing for 100 years in the film business. It’s not as easy as being on an air conditioned-soundstage in Atlanta but looks a ton more real.”
For the penthouse shots, a translight was utilized. “We shot some extremely high-resolution photography from the top of the MetLife building, which is the view from the penthouse,” reveals Morrison. “Stitched the whole lot together and gave it to a backing company which printed a 180-foot-long 25-foot-tall backing that we wrapped around 270 degrees and backlit with an enormous number of Vortex lights. When Chad Wiebe, our ILM supervisor, walked onto the set, he had a little bit of vertigo. It was that convincing. We could test the entire film in front of an audience for early director’s cuts and didn’t have to do any postvis. It was there in the dailies – the crew believed what they were shooting was the finished thing. That onset exposure with the translight was the correct exposure you would get if you were standing on the 48th floor of that building. We replaced it with an exact duplicate that was full of life, with the original photography animated and all sorts of helicopters, smokestacks, ACU’s going and blinking lights. But, essentially what we shot is out there. You can do a lot of this stuff with LEDs. But sometimes the colorspace that the LEDs work in doesn’t feel quite as natural as a bunch of photography on a vinyl backing with an enormous amount of light punched through. On any single shot looking out of the penthouse, we knew that the background was going to be replaced. If somebody is holding a glass, the reflections were of the translight and that’s all good. It looks like New York. We never touched a reflection on the floor.”
Given that the Ghost effect had already been established in the Ant-Man and the Wasp, its use in Thunderbolts* was more about enhancement. “We wanted to take a slightly more liberal view,” notes Morrison. “They would shoot multiple passes with the actor or stunt player doing variations and then composite that stuff and plus it with CG. In terms of the time onset, Jake and I didn’t want to get into hundreds and hundreds of passes again and again because each one has to be done as if it could be in the movie. Hannah John-Kamen plays Ghost. Nadia Lorencz was her stunt double, and we did switches where you had the stunt player drop out of frame and then an actor pop up. We had two complete Ghost outfits. There are shots where you’re literally chasing Ghost as she phases through somebody, reappears and does a punch. We did that stuff for real in the sense that Hannah would run as fast as possible at another actor and then drop to the floor at the last minute. Then I would have Nadia ready on the other side and at the right moment pop up, continue the run and do the stunt. You plus a load of this stuff in visual effects but it gives you a real cadence.”
The biggest challenge proved to be the Void effect. “There are basically three types of Voids,” remarks Morrison. “You have Void, the character, with a dark Louis Pullman, effectively a silhouette, with almost cel animation level of detail while everything else is zero. Give me a small amount of highlight, let it modulate and kiss that in. We drilled down hard on Void. What Void does is zap people. The uncomfortable reference for that is the Hiroshima shadows from the atomic blast where you literally had a person and the next minute you have a projected silhouette of a person. It’s not just to kill a person. You need to turn them into this existential crisis. We started to do this thing where it was almost a time-lapse of standing at the beach at sunset with the sun going down and you’re getting longer shadows. We built that in as well as this two-to-three-layer diseased mothball moldy texture. Then there are a number of shots after a person gets zapped where the shadows grow and somebody else steps into them then they get zapped. That’s all specifically built to educate the audience this is now growing at an exponential scale.”
“We had all of the wide shots, which were the third version of the Void effect, where we went into absolutely nothing,” continues Morrison. “But nothing is awfully dull. I had shot a bunch of aerial work for The Avengers which we had in the Marvel Studios library. I turned that over to visual development and said, ‘Let’s start working out ways to see shadows spreading outwards. What does it look like when it’s nothing?’ The answer is if there’s nothing it’s boring, but if it’s an enforced incredibly dark thick evil fog that lets you see just enough building detail to give you perspective reference but sucks away all the life from the whole thing, then it’s quite emotive. The secondary part of that was it all had to come from where Louis Pullman’s character Void was hanging. The interesting thing here was trying to find a way to make it spread. We did a test in previs where Louis’ position would be over Stark Tower as a single point of light. That was it. Here’s New York. It’s total darkness. Just this light and drop the character down. What happened is all of the shadows started spreading gradually from there and gave the audience a cue, ‘It’s happening here but would go everywhere.’ That was the most fun exploration in the film. It’s hard to come up with something new nowadays with visual effects. We’ve covered so much ground and so many talented people have come up with creative ideas. When you’re given a task like this which is how can you do something like this and make it look like it was in camera and optical. It’s a good challenge.”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
