Captain America: Civil War

DNEG delivered complex VFX work across several action-packed sequences for Marvel’s blockbuster movie, ‘Captain America: Civil War’.

Our VFX team’s key work included the Wanda and Hawkeye vs Vision fight sequence, for which we delivered a number of FX sims to bring the action to life on the big screen. Our team carried out extensive look dev to perfect Vision’s phase ability, using the Aurora Borealis and lightbulb filaments as reference, and further developed this in FX to show the reaction that occurs when he interacts with people or objects. We also created FX sims to showcase Wanda’s magic, which evolves constantly between shots. We developed small cores of energy with streams of particles that collide in front of her to generate the magical matter that drives her ability to control Vision’s density and phasing.

Our FX work continued for the United Nations bomb sequence, which required a large-scale photo-real explosion and a full CG exterior environment build. For the internal scene, we combined practically shot pyrotechnics at the podium with multiple render passes to show the panes of glass exploding inwards and the glass shards refracting the CG environment. The external explosion was built with internal illumination which then evolves into a dense ball of cloud. We were challenged to create something that felt dangerous and destructive, but that was localised so the building’s structural integrity wouldn’t be impacted. We created a 3D asset and did multiple destruction simulations to find the correct damage level. For the post-destruction scenes, we added smoke and smaller fires to the surrounding areas and built up dense layers of dust, debris and damage from the stories above.

VFX elements were an important part of the process in converting effects such as holograms and Scarlet Witch’s magic, for which the team used up to 12 layers of elements for each shot. For the transition out of the scene in which a young Tony Stark is seen in a holographic display, the stereo team worked with VFX vendor Animal Logic, creating stereo cameras for the VFX house to allow them to stereo render the hologram layers for the converted scene – a technique that Stereo team developed during its stereo conversion work on ‘Gravity’.

The stereo team delivered stereo conversion for 53 minutes of the runtime. The team used geometry for each of the main characters’ heads from cyber-scans of the actors, or if these weren’t available, creating their own geometry from supplied references. For characters like Black Panther, who has a CG suit, the team was able to take z-depths from the VFX vendors to ensure accuracy and consistency in the stereo.