You probably know who Chris Hemsworth is. You know how Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins and Idris Elba look like. Hell, after the tremendous success of
Thor: Ragnarok, you’ll probably recognize the picture’s director, extravagant Taika Waititi. Sure, you can’t make a movie without actors and a director. But you can’t make a movie without a film crew either. It’s a great moment to look at the work of
Ragnarok’s silent, unseen heroes – the artists responsible for bringing the Nine Realms to life.
The end of Thor’s trilogy was created by eighteen separate VFX vendors across the planet. They finished more than 2,700 shots, around 98% of the film passed through the Visual Effects Department’s hands. The most technically challenging sequence, the Valkyrie Flashback combined an innovative "
shooting rig that involved 145 motion controlled DSLR flash-guns mounted on a 60’ wide steel hoop, and a Phantom 4K Flex shooting at 1000 frames per second – not to mention reflooring a Stage to make it horse-friendly and a stunning amount of previz and techviz to plan each and every camera position to allow us to create shots with 15+ horse-riding Valkyries piece by piece". Impressive, right?
That short description should give you a better understanding why and how the visual effects crews shape a movie. You can read the full interview with Jake Morrison, the
Thor: Ragnarok overall VFX supervisor
HERE and learn how the ‘Quicksilver’ sequences in the X
-Men movies made the VFX teams’ work easier. Now let’s dive into the interviews with the individual VFX and animation studios:
METHOD STUDIOS – ANDREW HELLEN
Andrew Hellen has more than 20 years of experience in the visual effects,
Rangarok wasn’t his first Marvel project, as the artist also worked on
Iron Man 2. His studio had a chance to contribute to two big fight scenes: the opening in Muspelheim and Hela’s arrival on an Asgard plaza. Method is also responsible for the hilarious and totally unexpected Loki’s theater play. In Thor’s fight with the fire demons the goal was establishing Odinson at full power and giving Mjolnir a great moment before its inevitable destruction. Asgard’s Elite Guard slaughter was all about showing Hela’s indestructability and the play established the return of the god of mischief.
Surtur’s final design was a result of Method’s cooperation with Marvel. Comics were the starting point, but shortly the options narrowed to one full frame concept and that’s where the trouble begun: “
His physical presence was a hot topic for a while. When I first got involved with the film, Surtur was 12 feet tall; the physical set of his throne was built for a 12-foot tall Surtur. Then he was scaled up to 18 feet, which meant we ended up replacing the practical throne with CG. Surtur’s character was to be somewhat broken physically. We withered one of his arms, gave him a heavy limp and made him fairly lean, but when we did that, the fight with Thor looked too unevenly matched, so we beefed him up to Arnold Schwarzenegger type proportions. That looked too big so we toned him back down and didn’t make as much of his arm and leg being deformed”, Hellen explained.
The studio didn’t only render the flow of molten lava and all kinds of surface data, but even more surprising details. During the talk with Thor his temperature is kept low, but when the conversation gets “heated” Surtur fires up, as reds turn into a “fiery mood ring”. The director, Taika Waititi was supposed to be the Surtur's voice, but that changed in August when Clancy Brown joined the project.
Hellen is most proud of the Elite Guard battle with Hela. At the beginning of post-production, till mid-August the fight was contained in a single shot, with no live action. Then Marvel decided to change the scene and reshoot it using a “real” goddess of death. A stunt double of Hela starred in half of the shots “killing” around 400 Guards. 294 artists on Method Studies and 190 direct contributors worked on
Ragnarok for thirteen months, finalizing 481 shots that made the cut.
DOUBLE NEGATIVE – STUART LASHLEY
Despite bringing Themyscira to life in Patty Jenkins'
Wonder Woman, Double Negative found time to pick up the Sakaar wasteland and Valkyrie’s apartment scenes. The VFX supervisor Stuart Lashley really enjoyed the collaboration with Waititi and Morrison. According to him they were both “
inspiring and entertaining” for the team. Double Negative’s executed their clear vision of Sakaarian wastelands.
The studio worked on three sequences: Thor’s first meeting with Valkyrie, planning escape in her apartment and the after credits scene with the Grandmaster. They put a lot of thought in the junk mounds and wormholes, because of Waititi’s desire to create something real, but still otherworldly. The director’s reviews were apparently pretty “memorable”, but in a good way.
Double Negative worked on
Ragnarok for four months on nearly 200 shots with the team of approx. 250 people. The studio’s next big project is Ryan Coogler's
Black Panther.
INDUSTRIAL LIGHT & MAGIC – CHAD WIEBE
ILM is probably the most well-known VFX studio in the world. They began with a bang called
Star Wars and haven’t stopped since. They have a pretty tight relationship with Marvel Studios and
Ragnarok was another successful step in their relationship. Chad Wiebe had a chance to work again with Jake Morrison again after
The Dark World. They didn’t want to repeat “the same old”, but to combine the unique esthetics and Jack Kirby’s vision to create something fresh and new.
ILM mostly worked on the Hulk vs. Thor showdown, the Hulk Warrior Suite, and the sequence where Thor escapes to the Quinjet. The basic Hulk aster originated on the old model created by ILM for the
Avengers movies. That’s where the upgrades kicked in. Previously, the artists were subtly changing his hair or color, but
Ragnarok brought some big steps in the Green Giant’s evolution.
Head of Visual Development at Marvel Ryan Meinerding had a clear direction for the Hulk. “
Gone was the excessive brow ridge and sunken eyes, long upper lip and soft jaw. Instead we had sharp and streamlined features, a chiseled Jaw and forehead, a longer nose reducing the gap between nose and upper lip, adjusted eyes and a brand new haircut. His skin color was also amped back up to a more saturated green. There was a specific direction to make sure Hulk seemed intelligent and more in line with what you would expect from a superhero, and our modeling supervisor Lenny Lee scrutinized the smaller details to create a Hulk like we’ve never seen before”, Wiebe said.
Mark Rufallo, the on-screen Bruce Banner used the advanced ILM technology to present the Hulk-to-Banner transformation in a more realistic way. It was heavily influenced by the 1980 movie
Altered States starring William Hurt (you probably know him as Gen. "Thunderbolt" Ross) who’s character tried to bash himself back into his “normal”, human form. Waititi wanted to capture the essence of that scene to show the wide range of emotions on Banner’s face.
ILM’s job also required building a CGI model of the Gladiator Arena. Let’s just say that the project was enormous. “
Coming it at over 1300ft wide and over 460ft high, it had a seating capacity of over 160,000 crowd agents and used a light rig consisting of around 934 lights. Our biggest shots could have up to 100,000 agents visible at a time so render times could easily become a problem and solutions were needed to make things manageable. We relied on slicing the arena into 24 pie shaped wedges, and 10 individual tiers which allowed us to manage smaller slices as needed and break the arena up into sections which were re-compiled in Nuke in extreme cases”. Quite impressive, to say the least.
Environment supervisor Martijn Van Herk and his team helped ILM to create a procedural set up, allowing the studio to re-create the arena’s floor with all the destruction elements being added during the fight.
Ben-Hur from 1959 was one of the reference points during the designing of the Colosseum.
To create the huge, over 20 stories tall Grandmaster hologram, Morrison hit on an idea to set up a five camera array to film Jeff Goldblum’s performance, which would then be referenced and reconstructed, allowing ILM to create a digital version of Grandmaster. It gave better results than using a single camera. Wiebe’s crew put a Nuke set up over the projection, which gave the particles more glitchy quality. Two ILM teams in Vancouver and San Francisco delivered over 400 shots in 12 months.
DIGITAL DOMAIN – DAVE HODGINS
Digital Domain’s focus were two pivotal scenes, Thor & Loki elevator ride and the chase sequence on the heroes’ way to the Magnetar wormhole, aka “The Devil’s Anus”. The VFX studio also designed the Grandmaster Palace, which at one point in post-production had the Grandmaster’s gold face with a laser cannon in his forehead jutting out the side like “Mountain Rushmore”. The concept was rejected and the team settled on having the faces of the former champions (including Beta Ray Bill, Man-Thing, Ares and Bi-Beast) and the unfinished Hulk’s visage.
When it comes to spaceships, Digital Domain limited itself to adding additional color variations. The Grandmaster’s "orgy" ship named Commodore was the only asset that was redesigned to match the existing Framestore’s model. Hodgins’ crew also simulated clothes and longer capes which the actors didn’t always wear. The supervisor really loves the wide establishing shot of Sakaar when Warsong, the Valkyrie’s ship starts the engine to reach to "The Devil's Anus".
The biggest obstacle the company had to face was creating the city layout and enough detail on the buildings to prevent crazy blurs for ships that were flying at 500 mph. Digital Domain joined the project in May to finish around the middle of September with exactly 188 shots made by more than 150 team members from two studios in Los Angeles and Vancouver.
FRAMESTORE – ALEXIS WAJSBROT, KYLE MCCULLOCH
& JONATHAN FAWKNER
It looks like Framestore and Marvel really play well together, as the British studio worked on many MCU movies such as
Iron Man 3, Doctor Strange and both
Guardians of the Galaxy flicks. The
Ragnarok’s producers put a lot of faith in the supervisors Alexis Wajsbrot, Kyle Mcculloch & Jonathan Fawkner and their teams, as the studio successfully managed to bring to life Rocket Raccoon, adult and baby Groot and even Doctor Strange’s Cloak of Levitation.
According to Alexis, Taika Waititi didn’t create unnecessarily tense atmosphere and his reviews were a fun and collaborative process. The director was very focused on the symmetry of the shots and tried to make the action as centered as possible to give the movie a more stylized and graphical feeling.
Framestore built the rainbow bridge’s fight with Fenris, the undead Einherjar, Hela and Surtur. The studio also worked on the ending with the rescue spaceship, the Statesman. Yes, the company is responsible for the “Led Zeppelin” sequence and the “Uber-Thor”. Working on the last act was pretty stressful, as the changes were applied till the last second.
All the new characters were challenging, “
Korg was made of rocks and still needed to speak and express emotion, so he was both an artistic challenge as well as a technical challenge to get the rocks to transform and not deform. Hela’s costume and headdress was really challenging to nail. Miek has been more straightforward and our first vignette was really liked by the studio, so he is very similar in the final movie as our first animation test. The look of the D-guards changed drastically during the movie, from being more animalistic to looking more like a human zombie”, Alexis elaborated.
It turns out that Fenris is a she-wolf and it was one of the hardest parts for Framestore. The studio had to answer important questions about her height (especially in comparison to the Hulk), condition and even eyes’ color. Her “real life” model was a Husky named Dickens, so at the beginning Fenris looked like a husky, but the team finally settled on a giant black wolf, mainly to show that she’s a real threat and for the more menacing posing and facial expressions.
Another big obstacle was animating the lord of Muspelheim, fire giant Surtur as Waititi wanted to make him fast, even if he was huge. “
We looked at sword fighters, wrestlers, and bodybuilders for inspiration on the shapes and poses we wanted to use on Surtur, always keeping in mind his new-found strength and power”, said the supervisor Kyle McCulloch.
To render the destruction of Asgard from the hands of Surtur and his Twilight Sword, Framestore used an average of 20 000 processors. To render
Ragnarok on a single CPU, it would have taken 3921 years! Of course, Alexis favorite shot was Thor jumping into a pile of undead guards. The team delivered 198 shots in the last week of post-production out of the 459 total. It took them a year or 38 052 man days.
LUMA PICTURES – KEVIN SOULS (VFX SUPERVISOR) & RAPHAEL A. PIMENTEL (ANIMATION SUPERVISOR)
Luma developed eight sequences including the end tag of the film, plus “
Korg Meets Thor, Loki Visits Thor, Pre-Fight Staging, Parade of Victors, Revolution Get Gun, Boys Go To Garage and Hulk Vs. Thor”.
Raphael A. Pimentel found the work on Korg pretty difficult. The beloved character was made up of 1,334 individual pieces of rock. He had to look intermediately, but also gesticulate and keep the “easy going” Taika’s performance. In the movie Korg has two friends, Miek and Biff. The deadly Miek was a shared asset with Framestore, but Biff was built from the scratch. The studio used the skin of rhinoceros as a reference, and later added peach fuzz. The team also created a rig and setup to simulate his cloth, heavy leather and thick burlap.
Pimentel confirms that Miek loves Wushu, a form of martial arts. The studio captured a lot of punching, kicking and flipping at Luma’s motion-capture room. The supervisor is very proud of the results, especially when it comes to Korg and his unique and charming persona. Luma Pictures is currently working on
Black Panther and
A Wrinkle in Time.