The visual effects company Digital Domain has shared an exclusive clip with Digital Trends showcasing the work that went into making one of the most pivotal scenes in Captain America: Brave New World. At over eight minutes long, the scene shows Captain America (Anthony Mackie) and the Falcon (Danny Ramirez) intercepting a dogfight over the Pacific Ocean between US and Japanese forces that could lead to a full-blown war.
But what really makes the scene unique is that it’s almost entirely CGI. “There was a lot of footage where they captured Anthony Mackie on all these wires. But by the time it was over, it was all CG,” previsualization supervisor Cameron Ward told Digital Trends.
In the previsualization (previs) clip, we get a good glimpse at the early-stage CGI they used to build the scene completely from scratch, including the massive open-ocean setting. Ward said the biggest challenge in the scene wasn’t creating such a large space. It was the speed at which all the characters and objects were traveling.
“The biggest challenge with this scene was the speed at which everything was moving,” Ward said. “We had 600-mile-per-hour missiles flying through the air above an open ocean that we had to build from scratch. You have to set up your camera in a way that feels like Cap just flew by at 600 miles an hour chasing after them. So we had to ask ourselves, how do we visualize that?”
Creating the characters wasn’t the only challenge
Creating the clouds was also a surprisingly hefty task for the team. Digital Domain created its own proprietary cloud shader tool to help produce the right sizes, shading, textures, shadows, and various levels of opacity that we see in real clouds. The team even layered four to six cloud renderings on top of each other to give each cloud a varying level of brightness and depth, as we see in real clouds.
Light and shadow were another huge focus for Digital Domain. Taking place over a reflective surface like water meant the team needed to accurately recreate the way sunlight reflects on the ocean. They also needed to create shadows to help give the scene a photorealistic look, so the team made sure to pay attention to every frame that involved a jet or character soaring through the air so they could create a shadow that would be cast on the ocean below.
Before Captain America, Ward had worked on tons of huge projects, like The Last of Us, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Thunderbolts*. But he says Brave New World was his biggest venture yet and said that Digital Domain worked on the movie for an entire year. “I’ve been with DD for five years,” he said, “and this is the biggest, longest sequence I’ve ever worked on. It actually became much more CG than intended as the project went on, after they realized some of the plates didn’t work because of things like reflections in the shot.”
Now you can watch Captain America: Brave New World at home. The Marvel film arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on May 13. Disney+ subscribers can stream the film on the service starting May 28.