Digital Domain Crafts 8.5-Minute Almost All-CG Dogfight and Environment for Marvel Studios' Captain America: Brave New World

Digital Domain Crafts 8.5-Minute Almost All-CG Dogfight and Environment for Marvel Studios' Captain America: Brave New World

Brie Clayton March 10, 2025

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VFX Team Elevates Marvel's Latest Film with Groundbreaking Visual Effects and Dynamic Action

In Captain America: Brave New World, Captain America (Anthony Mackie) and Falcon (Danny Ramirez) work to prevent an all-out war between the USA and Japan over resources left in the wake of a celestial event. Digital Domain, a long-time creative partner of Marvel Studios, was called upon to bring this latest installment to life under the leadership of Visual Effects Supervisor Hanzhi Tang, Visual Effects Producer Daniel Brimer and Digital Effects Supervisor Ryan Duhaime. The film features an intense aerial battle where Captain America and Falcon intervene to quell the escalating conflict. The team's expertise in visual effects played a crucial role in crafting the exhilarating 8.5-minute dogfight, which is almost entirely created in CG above the Indian Ocean and through clouds, immersing audiences in the action. Compositing Supervisor Michael Melchiorre and Hanzhi drew on their experience from Stealth, a film they had previously worked on together at Digital Domain.

The project presented various obstacles, especially concerning the scale and speed of the assets involved. Set within a 10-mile radius, the scene featured jets flying at over 300 mph and missiles flying up to 1,000 mph, all surrounded by clouds and ocean, making animation and rendering a complex task. The award-winning team worked diligently to create a sense of scale, focusing on the appropriate atmosphere and distance to make the scene feel expansive. This required meticulous crafting by the Digital Domain artists to ensure it was all photoreal.

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Captain America, Falcon, and Digidoubles At the start of the sequence, Captain America and Falcon fly in and land on an American Navy ship stationed in the Indian Ocean outside of Celestial Island. As the story unfolds, two American pilots, under mind control, go rogue, igniting the conflict. Captain America and Falcon take off in pursuit, determined to prevent casualties by stopping missiles from striking opposing forces, all while facing attacks themselves. This high-stakes scenario sets the stage for an intense and thrilling sequence.

Digital Domain utilized plates of the actors' faces where possible and was responsible for creating full CG digital doubles for the main characters, Captain America and Falcon, as well as for the pilots of the F-18 jets and F-35s. Both American and Japanese pilots were depicted using plate-based techniques, with added visors. To differentiate the pilots, dark-tinted and opaque visors were created for the Japanese pilots, while clear visors were used for the American pilots.

The Clouds, Ocean, and Celestial Tiamut In this sequence, Digital Domain also reintroduces the visually stunning Celestial Island-a setting that has not been explored since its appearance in Eternals (2021). To craft the sequence's intricate digital environment, which features clouds, a vast ocean, and the Celestial Island, the Digital Domain team sourced multiple references to ensure that every element felt authentic and heightened the dramatic tension of the scene.

The clouds functioned almost as characters in their own right, playing a crucial role as the backdrop for the action unfolding through, below, and above them. They added texture and provided dynamic perspectives that enriched the visual storytelling. Recreating these clouds was extremely complex; CG Supervisor Brett Ellis and his team referenced numerous images to ensure consistency in cloud types, drawing on Digital Domain's previous experience from films like Black Widow and Elevation. During the development process, Digital Domain's team created a new Cloud Shader, a task that took nearly three months to perfect and enabled them to produce stylized clouds that matched the look and feel of the film. For this project, they also simulated clouds to achieve a cotton-like look and feel, layering up 4 to 6 clouds at a time to build depth and establish the appropriate distance. For compositing, Hanzhi and Michael collaborated to analyze actual clouds at different times of day, ensuring they were backlit and varied in translucency, while also reacting realistically to the surrounding environment.

In creating the ocean, Digital Domain utilized its standard toolkit in Houdini. The distance presented challenges, as multiple settings were required for various perspectives, including extreme close-ups, mid-ground views, and high-altitude shots. The compositing team had full control over the density of the cloud shadows on the ocean surface, the amount of sunlight reflecting off the water, and the brightness of the whitecaps, all of which enhanced the photorealism of the scene.

With no direct references available for the scale of the Celestial Tiamut, the team adapted their vision by drawing inspiration from various elements around the world. The massive Celestial structure emerging from the ocean necessitated careful scaling of the perspective. Additionally, the environment department undertook extensive development to determine the visual elements, including the type of haze and varying fall-offs, to accurately capture t

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