How That Massive Airport Fight In CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR Was Brought To Life

Though the airport fight from Captain America: Civil War seemed relatively small in scale in comparison to its comic book counterpart, the battle between superheroes ended up being one of the best action sequences in superhero movie history. It's a testament to the work of Industrial Light & Magic that the sequence, and most of the characters in it, was almost entirely digital. "The airport is a hundred percent digital," said ILM visual effects supervisor Russell Earl. "Spider-Man, Giant-Man, and Black Panther are always one-hundred percent CG. Iron Man, War Machine, and then we’ve got Vision." Of course, "real" characters such as Black Widow, Captain America, and The Winter Soldier were added in after being shot against a green screen in Atlanta, though many of those scenes didn't even make the final cut. "We had one shot with Bucky and Captain America, at the real airport, in a real place, running towards us," Earl laughed, "and we ended up rotoscoping them off of that background, and replacing it."

When it came to making the film, the addition of numerous characters made the film a far greater challenge than its predecessor, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. "Winter Soldier, for all intents and purposes, could have been a ‘70s thriller, or a Bourne movie," Earl said. "Getting to Civil War, it was, ‘How is that going to work on this one?’ Because, obviously, there’s more superhero-y characters, with Vision or Wanda. It was thinking about Spider-Man; how do you take that [character], and keep that same sort of real-world feel? We shot thousands and thousands of pictures. We would go out there with LiDAR scanners, which basically provide an exact representation of the geometry. And then we take that, and we rebuild everything. We had six hundred-plus assets, and you could be anywhere on that airport," Earl said. "From when you’re with Ant-Man on that stair car at a half-inch scale, anywhere to when he’s 50-feet tall, the digital environment would hold up."

Spider-Man, of course, was one of the highlights of the fight, though crafting his appearance was a challenge for the team. When filming on Civil War began, there was no clear decision on how the character would be visually realized in the film, and a camera-ready Spidey suit was built for the shoot. Tom Holland hadn't been cast when shooting was underway, so a parkour artist played the role in his stead. When the decision to go for an entirely CGI look was made halfway through the shoot, it fell to Earl and his team to create the newest version of the wall-crawler. "Our suit had to look and feel real," said Earl. ILM, along with directors Joe and Anthony Russo, collaborated with Marvel’s own visual development group and Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige to develop the updated look for the character. "We did a lot of tests and studies to hone in. The suit is designed by Stark, so he’s sort of one-upped it a little bit — so how do you bring the Stark tech look into that suit? And obviously, we wanted it to feel like real world materials, and not do anything that was out of that realm. It needed to feel like it was a photographed suit."

It may not have been the first time Spidey has been all CGI in his scenes, but Earl and his team went the extra mile to bring the new suit to life. ILM used a layered process: a cloth simulation handled the fabric, which ran atop a muscle simulation that provided the look of Peter Parker’s body (Scans of Tom Holland served as the basis). Tom Holland also performed every line and action of the character through motion capture, with those performances getting integrated into ILM’s animation. To avoid the stiff, inexpressive look that Spider-Man’s face has had in his previous film incarnations, the visual effects team devised a version of the mask that stretched from the jaw when he spoke. "How much does the fabric slide, how much does it stretch, how much do we see his jaw motion? Adding intricacies, like the camera irising to the eyes themselves, so we could get a little bit of movement in the eyes. There’s a lot of little subtle things that all add up to making him feel like he’s there, and part of the team."

When the scene was complete, ILM was pretty satisfied with the results, and the team certainly did an incredible job of blending the computer generated imagery with the live action performances. "Maybe I am just fooling myself, but I think a lot of the time not everyone knew exactly what they were looking at," Earl said. "I don’t know if everyone knew that the airport was always digital. I think by the end they caught on, but that was our goal: that you wouldn’t really know what you were looking at. In a good way."

Be sure to head to the full Verge article for even more details! What part of the airport battle was your favourite? Sound off below!