This Was The Massive Amount Of VFX Marvel Used To Produce ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy 3’

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Making a movie like ‘Guardians of the Galaxy 3’ come true requires a series of processes that sometimes go beyond what is imaginable. Despite having broken a stratospheric record, using a total of 22,500 makeup prostheses to bring its characters to life, thus avoiding the excessive use of editing tools, the film required enormous VFX and post-production work to be able to see the light.

In fact, it took a “community” of 10 special effects housesincluding Weta FX, and a total of 3066 special effects shotsin order to finish the arduous creative task, which had James Gunn’s post-production team in a tangle for a total of 15 months.

To successfully create the footage, studies on baby raccoons for the story of Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), we analyzed Golden Retrievers to create Cosmothe talking dog, and months of painstaking work to put together complex action sequences and explosionslike one of the battles, which has already become iconic after its premiere.

Talking with Variety, the post-production team that worked on the film has gone over some of the processes they went on to bring these characters and scenes to life.

In the case of cosmothe talking dog, the VFX supervisor of framestore, Stephane Naze, commented that the team had collected archival photos of a real dog and converted it into a digital format. However, the process is not as simple as it may seem. The small detail of speech was missing.

For this to be realistic and have special value, Naze claimed that Cosmo had to have an emotional plane. “everything comes from her [Maria Bakalova, la actriz que le da voz al animal]. She was saying the text and it was very important that we feel it. So, we analyze his interpretation shot by shot and We look for the best way to convey those emotions.”

The specific breed of the dog had arisen from the companion animal of one of the producers. “He was always sending us videos saying: ‘Here he is sad. Here he is happy.’ We asked him for photos of his eyes to get more details.”

In the third tape of the ‘Guardians’, the hearts of the fans broke into a thousand pieces when they learned about the past of one of its main members: Rocket.

In the process they followed to create their story, the first stage was focused on the analysis of real raccoons, just like in the previous case. However, here more creative licenses were allowed, even trying to put “more shoulders, so that it had a more human shape“. EITHER “using less animation effects when he is a baby, and, when he becomes an adult, increasing his emotions.”

Stef Ceretti he worked on these shots, many of which take place in cages. In total, it took more than a year and a half to wrap everything up. On James Gunn’s methods, Ceretti commented:

“He’s very specific about how to shoot things.. She has a RED camera and wanted everything that happened in the cages to be shot in the same way as everyone else. That is to say, he wanted his directing style to be reflected in the special effects scenes.”

“We decided to shoot the first two days with the actors so that James could direct the scene exactly the way he wanted.”

Another of the moments where the VFX supervisors would stop was one of the battles in the movie. Specifically, the one that is accompanied by the song ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’, by the Beastie Boys.

As the music plays, we witness an epic battle between the Guardians and the High Evolutionary. A sequence that goes through the fight. The moment is made up of 18 shots, which were later digitally joined.

Guy Williams of Weta FX he directed the effects for the third act of the film, commenting: “If you read a James Gunn script, you can see that he thinks about music as he writes. He’s a lyrical director.”

“There is a lot of coming and going and we have to make that movement invisible. We have to decide when we switch from a real actor to a digital creation.then we mix both and they should be perfectly united.”

Another challenge was coordinating the music and the action, keeping the rhythm. Michael Cozens, an animation supervisor and Williams’ partner, was explaining the process. “We watch the timing of the explosions and gunshots, and sync them to the beat of the song.”

“We had to use the moments between Quill (Chris Pratt) and Nebula as a bridge to the digital creations. We had to maintain that throughout the post-production process of the shot.”

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