Avengers: Endgame Creating the Last Battleground

Avengers: Endgame Creating the Last Battleground

Hillary Lewis March 10, 2024

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Avengers: Endgame hit theaters on April 26th, and went on to break some of the biggest box office records in various markets. Setting the record for highest opening weekend gross worldwide in the US, Canada, and more than 40 other markets including Australia, Brazil, China, Egypt, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. It now sits as the second highest grossing film of all time, only behind James Cameron's Avatar.

Add a Cinemascore grade of A from audiences and a 94% Fresh rating from RottenTomatoes.com and the film's popularity has far surpassed its predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War.

The Russo Brothers made the seemingly impossible happen in Endgame, with bold narrative choices that wrapped up a 22 movie narrative, and brought every major hero together for one epic battle sequence. We see them impossibly reunited after being blipped out by the infinity stones and fighting together to defeat Thanos. Not without great cost, Marvel fans watched the demise of several legendary characters in the Marvel universe.

With more superheroes brought together in Endgame than all previous installments that came before it, Weta Digital was given a huge task. Creative COW's Hillary Lewis sat down again with Weta Digital's VFX Supervisor, Matt Aitken, on how his team devised a workflow to uphold the CG integrity of so many characters and their powers all in one epic battle.

Matt Aitken, Weta Digital

Did you have more VFX artists than Infinity War to pull off the final battle?

We had a significantly bigger crew this time. Partly because there's more shots, we did a bigger chunk of this movie than in Infinity War. That was just the way Marvel allocated the work through various facilities.

And partly because the post schedule was slightly shorter. They ended up shooting most of the end battle sequence and a block of additional photography was scheduled out for September/October of last year. So that material didn't really get turned over to us until the end of 2018, beginning of 2019.

So slightly more compressed schedule and more shots. We were roughly 400 people on Infinity Wars and ended up at 600 people for Endgame.

When Thanos made his debut in Avengers: Infinity War, he became one of the most expressive CGI/motion capture characters in Marvel history, and, in fact, cinema history. With Endgame, you've further expanded upon his facial system to make him more expressive than ever. What were the steps you took to achieve this?

He was pretty successful in Infinity War, but there's always more that we can do.

One thing we felt working shots for Infinity War, we hit a wall on certain parts of the range of facial expression in particular around corners of the mouth. We felt the rig we built didn't allow us a full range of expression and had to patch certain frames of his facial work.

Once Infinity War wrapped and we knew we would be working on Endgame, we took the opportunity to do that remedial work and got the facial modeling team to sculpt out some of the shapes that were missing there.

We are constantly developing our facial animation capabilities and there was some new tech that came out which we call deep shapes'. It's a way of adding fine level detail to the transitions from one facial expression to the next. It's like another fine octave of shape work and it doesn't affect the start and the end of the transition.

So we still have complete control over the shape of the face and the facial performances. But what we get with deep shapes is added complexity with a sense of inertia and the mesh of facial tissue, the facial muscles are firing and the shape of the face is changing.

We know it's not something you read consciously but it adds that extra level of detail and a more natural believability to these characters.

Thanos is more physical than we've ever seen him, instead of fighting with the magical abilities of the infinity stones, he fights with a massive double-sided blade. Was capturing Josh Brolin's movements even more challenging because he was more violently agile than in Infinity War?

Well he's four years younger than he was in Infinity War due to the time travel from 2014. We wanted him to appear more agile and more destructive. He's not the philosopher of Infinity War anymore, his express goal is to destroy the universe.

We had to do a lot of keyframe animation on top of the motion capture of his fight sequence performances. Thanos is very tall, so to get his body mechanics, his mass, his scale, his agility, we ended up working off Josh Brolin and motion capture from a stunt performer doing his fight moves. We needed to dial Josh's performances on top of the stunt performer's motion capture. So it's that keyframe animation on top of the motion capture that's giving us the final product.

I like to think about the beginning of the battle where Thanos is squaring off against Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man. He's dealt with Iron Man and Thor, and it's just Cap left. And Thanos starts laying into him with his blade. He's vicious and he's fast and ends up chopping out great chunks of Cap's shield. There's a lot of keyframe animation happening there to get that sequence to work.

This is part of the overall character animation pipeline with Maya, a commercial 3D animation software, but adding a lot of extra functionality with plugins and Thanos' animation puppet, something that works really well for the animators.

What were the biggest challenges of portraying Tony's death? Was it difficult striking a balance between showing a fatal amount of damage without distracting from his last breaths? Or something else more challenging about the scene?

Those are really ke

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