Avengers: Endgame may have come and gone from theaters… and come and gone again with the highest-grossing box office record to its name, but there’s still plenty left to marvel at about the superhero ensemble flick. Let’s talk about the final battle! Not only does it bring together just about every major character we’ve met over the MCU’s 22 movie history, but as you can imagine, there were a ton of visual effects that went into the sequence. Just take a look at this behind-the-scenes video of the third-act fight:
Jaw-dropped yet? The video comes from Weta Digital, a visual effects company that has been in the business for over 25 years. This reel on Endgame switches between various stages of the rendering for the final battle. Showcasing the incredible sequence in its finished product, Weta Digital reveals green screen shots, early animation shots and the amazing amount of layers in the background of the actors during the film’s massive battle.
The best part is obviously seeing Dave Bautista’s Drax stabbing at a drape of green screen, but this nonetheless all looks like an impossible feat of work by the digital artists. Weta VFX supervisor, Matt Aiken, previously told CinemaBlend they actually drew heavily from what they learned from orchestrating the battle sequences they worked on in the Lord of the Rings trilogy over 15 years ago.
While we tend to place a ton of attention toward the actors’ performances in the epic, they are just one piece of a larger puzzle Marvel Studios has to coordinate with to make the high-budget finished product. Endgame also called upon the VFX company Framestore, which assisted in the film’s motion capture performances and costume rendering among other contributions. Check it out:
This behind-the-scenes footage is really intriguing to watch! If you’ve been curious about how Mark Ruffalo goes from his mo-cap pajamas to Professor Hulk, this gives us some indication of how. It shows Mark Ruffalo wearing his suit with a marker for his character’s head way above him and there is a video camera on his face catching his reactions. It’s cool that the actor was actually on set with his other cast-mates for many of the scenes and the animators came in later.
Is anyone else amazed that the white suits the Avengers wear in Endgame were created with VFX? You’d think they would have created the costumes, plus they look really convincing! Maybe it was part of Endgame’s secrecy? The video shows the characters in their own suits as they do that epic walk together, but later it was rendered with the matching Quantum Realm gear.
There’s some serious movie magic behind the release. It’s safe to say a large part of Avengers: Endgame is visual effects. Infinity War reportedly was 97% VFX, and we’d imagine its follow-up wasn't that different.
