Marvel cinematic universe
Trevor Hogg travels through the Marvel Cinematic Universe speaking to the studio and creative talent responsible for bringing its superheroes to life on the big screen
The Marvel team on bringing superheroes to life
The decision to produce rather than license its comic book characters for film, starting with the release of Iron Man in 2008, proved a turning point for Marvel. In order to accomplish this cinematic feat, Marvel Studios’ president Kevin Feige sought the expertise of both Louis D’esposito and Victoria Alonso.
“For the longest of times we divided ourselves. Kevin was always the story and creative vision of our company, Lou [Marvel Studios’ co-president] came from production so he was our line producer and executive producer dealing with all things production, and I was responsible for visual effects, post-production and stereo,” explains Marvel Studios’ executive vice president of physical production, Victoria Alonso, who previously worked at Rhythm & Hues.
The Marvel trinity
Over the course of orchestrating the release of 13 movies, the creative partnership of the trio has remained intact. “It’s exactly the same!” chuckles Victoria. “This is why it works. We call ourselves ‘The Three Amigos’. We’re different people but we have the utmost respect and love for one another, and for the craft that we do together.”
This spirit of collaboration is prevalent during review sessions. “When presenting work, I’m showing it to Kevin with the director, Victoria, and Lou at the same time,” explains Marvel Studios’ VFX supervisor Jake Morrison, who oversaw Ant-man. “In some studios, there is a moment when you present something, then it disappears, and they’ll get back to you. That absolutely doesn’t happen at Marvel. If there are any concerns about what we are doing or any notes, you get all of them at once. Any disagreements in the room are knotted out right then and there. Sometimes it’s: ‘Let’s go down these two paths and we’ll see which one works out’. They’re an incredibly creative bunch.”
Victoria started in production and then went to visual effects facilities. “I took all of the good things from everywhere I’ve been and avoided repeating what didn’t work. The facility approach I like is this family feeling, where people you trust consistently roll from job to job because that pays off, and as long as everybody is getting along it’s like perfect casting. I also like to share data and information within teams since that’s how facilities get strong as they continue to learn while growing, because the same people are there; it’s just the movies that change.”
VFX supervisor Dan Deleeuw, who was responsible for Captain America: Civil War, agrees with the Marvel family workplace philosophy which carries over to the VFX vendors and on-set contributors. “You can go to Russell Bobbitt in props and say ‘we need Hawkeye’s quiver in The Avengers’ and he knows where it is. Some of The Third Floor previz team we’re working with now [on Avengers: Infinity War] go back to Iron Man 2, so if we need a character from another film they have it, bring it in, and we use it.” Dan adds, “You try to find likeminded individuals to work with, because then you’ll get to the finish line quicker.”
Everything is done to make sure that nothing overshadows the real focus. “The best thing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe [MCU] is that when I go to see the films, I care deeply about the characters,” remarks Jake, who understands why Marvel hires independent filmmakers such as Peyton Reed for Ant-man and Taika Waititi for Thor: Rangnarok. “If you strip away all of the blockbuster trappings like the big sets, big camera moves, explosions and CG Helicarriers, what you’ve got is storytelling. If you watch Taika Waititi’s Boy or What We Do in the Shadows or Hunt for the Wilderpeople, the production gets steadily more complex, but they’re character pieces. Taika was asked in an interview, ‘What’s it like to be finally working with an unlimited
I took all of the good things from everywhere I’ve been and avoided repeating what didn’t work Victoria Alonso, executive vice president of physical production, Marvel Studios
budget?’ He’s like, ‘no. There’s always a lid on the box’.”
VFX begins at home
Marvel Studios’ own visual development team is run by Ryan Meinerding. Victoria says: “It’s great to have that original conversation early on because sometimes it inspires the story, sometimes it defines the story, and sometimes it reshapes the story.”
Jake adds: “Ryan is one of the best artists I have ever had the pleasure of working with, his character nuances and framing are stunning and he dreams in cinema and comic books. The Visual Development Department at Marvel Studios creates key frames which are moments in the movie. For Ant-man, it would be the moment where Yellowjacket got run over by Thomas the Tank Engine. Ryan will paint that or art direct it. The key frame has so much inertia, presence and possibility, that you could start with the script and a handful of those key frames. It’s not hard to push forward if the target already looks awesome.”
Victoria adds: “Every movie that we’ve made, Ryan has done a key frame which we all say, ‘that has to be in the movie. Let’s figure out a way to write it’. And these turn into some of the most iconic moments.”
“If there’s one thing that Kevin Feige, Louis D’esposito and Victoria Alonso have brought to prominence in the VFX industry, it’s the idea of using every single tool in the toolbox to tell the story,” says Jake. “It’s very much the story pushing the visual effects and tech forward, not vice versa.”
One question is always asked: “Every time we open this Pandora’s Box, the underlying sentiment is, ‘Does it serve the purpose of this story?’” says Victoria. “Why is it that we want Thor’s hammer to do this or Captain America’s shield to do that? If it doesn’t serve the story it has no place in our movie.”
Despite the superhero subject matter, everything is grounded in reality. “At Marvel, we always strive for photorealism,” observes Dan. “With Vision, you’re working with the performance of Paul Bettany and modifying his face for the final look of the film. Going all the way back to the comics, those characters have always lived in the real world to the point that even in the script they call each other by their first names. They call Captain America Cap, but Iron Man is always Tony and Black Widow is always natasha. Guardians of the Galaxy certainly has a heightened sense of colour and design, but that lends itself to it.”
A significant indication that Marvel Studios has come a long way from licensing comic book characters to other movie studios occurred when a deal was reached with Sony to enable a famous wall-crawler to appear in the MCU.
“We knew going into making Captain America: Civil War how much of a role Spidey played in the comic,” says Dan. “It got to the point that, when we were doing motion studies with Black Panther, the rumours were that they really wanted Spidey in it. When Spidey started getting into previz people began to get more excited about it. Tom Holland hadn’t yet been cast when we started shooting, so we had a costume and a stunt performer. Then they cast Tom who has a slight frame while our stunt performer’s muscles were developed from parkour.”
A digital double was utilised to solve the mismatch problem. “Tom’s performance dictated everything from Peter Parker to Spidey in the suit talking to even how he swang through the air. It was the idea of a younger Spidey who was not as experienced, so sometimes he spins around in the air when he’s swinging.”
Each MCU phase concludes with superheroes teaming together. Interestingly, Captain America: Civil War was nicknamed Avengers 2.5. “It was a great experience,” remarks Dan, who is supervising Avengers: Infinity War and its sequel, which are
being made back-to-back with principal photography commencing in november. “You know the difficulty of planning a fight with that many characters, and in terms of design, information and implementation of the visual effects. If you needed a training course, the splash panel of the airport fight was a great place to begin.”
Producing Avengers: Infinity War and its untitled sequel is much like compressing a season of an epic HBO fantasy series into two movies. “It’s big! By the time we’re finished they’ll have film classes about the film in terms of everything that we were able to accomplish. It’s a lot of moving parts to put the two together and interweave the schedules and get everything to work. The guys who make Game of Thrones do an awesome job.”
The plan is to get ahead of the technological curve. “We talked to all of the vendors and are saying to everybody, ‘We want the next generation of things.’ It’s my hope that we will get them,” Dan says. “We’re incredibly fortunate in that, based on the films that we make, we have the best visual effects houses in the business.”
Jake also thinks that the teams work well together, “You look at what works and do post-mortems for every show,” states Jake. “If it’s something that is scriptable we write it. We all build on top of what everyone else is doing. Victoria encourages the visual effects supervisors to get together [most of time remotely] and share any information. If I’m shooting with a particular type of camera that I think is really cool, I can ping Dan Deleeuw or Chris Townsend or Stef Ceretti and say, ‘This is great’. Or conversely, ‘We just had an absolute nightmare with X’.”
Victoria Alonso is proud of the workplace atmosphere. “It’s pretty utopian. In our hallways you have three or four teams who are always chatting with each other and saying, ‘I have to tell you what I did with this. I think it would be really helpful’. It’s so cool to have every team as a little family, and then there’s this big family that we all belong to and that everyone wants to be a part of.”