Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Discover how Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is raising the bar for VFX as Trevor Hogg goes behind the scenes...
Discover how the Marvel movie is raising the VFX bar as we go behind the scenes to talk character creation and fantastical worlds
F ilmmaker James Gunn (Super) faces high expectations as he is reunited with a band of intergalactic criminals that includes a gun-toting sarcastic racoon, an anthropomorphic tree with a limited vocabulary, and a renegade half-human on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.
This time around the story focuses on Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) uncovering the identity of his father and with the help of his misfit friends, saving the universe from an evil and genetically perfected High Priestess.
With all of the action taking place in outer space, a key member of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 was Marvel Studios VFX supervisor Christopher Townsend who previously worked on Captain America: The First Avenger, Iron Man 3, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. “The first [Guardians of the Galaxy film] was about getting people to know and love these characters,” remarks Christopher Townsend. “The sequel carries on from where we left off in terms of humour and visual style, but we’re taking it in slightly different directions with the character development and the story. It’s fun.” An effort was made to emulate the follow-up success of The Empire Strikes Back and The Godfather, Part II.
“You can’t just repeat or say we’re going to do a completely different movie,” Christopher says. “There’s the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe so things have to fit into certain worlds or set of films; however, each film has to exist in their own right.”
Complicating matters once again for the digital background replacements were blue and green skin alien beings such as Yandu (Michael Rooker) and Gamora (Zoe Saldana). “I talked to [Marvel Studios VFX supervisor] Stephane Ceretti about what they tried to do on Guardians of the Galaxy, which was switching the green and blue screens around,” remarks Christopher. “We had the first five of the brand new RED 8K cameras using the latest chip and found through testing that the RED tended to work much better with blue screen in terms of the way it handled digital noise and how you were able to pull the key. There were so many scenes where green and blue characters are in the same shot that we eventually ended up with blue screen throughout. Also, we were wrapping entire stages in Atlanta with 360 screens so it became prohibitive both in cost and time to be saying, ‘Okay, now we got Gamora. Quick, put the blue screen up. Now we got Yondu. Quick, bring the green screen.’ I think it was the right choice.” Designing The world “Scott Chambliss [Star Trek Into Darkness] was our production designer and his art department came up with a huge array of fantastic concept art that we have taken as our starting point in many places,” says Christopher. “A lot of the character design was done initially internally with the Marvel Studios visual development team.”
The galactic setting resulted in only 54 of 2,400 shots not having visual effects. “Inside the Eclector [the massive Ravager spaceship] there was a complete practical set without any blue screen,” Christopher explains. “Unfortunately, you can’t build outer space... You have to rely on fully digital environments. Even though we shot on sets in Atlanta, an awful lot had to be rebuilt and recreated in order to offer up the sensibility and visual