December was a great month for Marvel fans, the return of Charlie Cox as Daredevil in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Vincent D’onofrio as Kingpin in Hawkeye, reignited the hopes of Marvel Netflix fans to make the Defenders Saga on Netflix canon to the MCU(Marvel Cinematic Universe).
Hawkeye had tons of great shots, and many of them required heavy amounts of VFX (Visual Effects), which ILM (Industrial Light & Magic) and RISE VFX Studios have broken down.
ILM On Creating The Entirity Of Manhatten
Yes, every show is archived so that we can actually put it back online if we’re working with the same client. So, it’s a process. It’s not like we have a folder and you simply click on it. It’s a lot of data, and files have to be restored from tape back-ups. We went as far back as Avengers, mostly to recreate that first sequence that the show starts with–the Avengers battle of New York. It was pretty fun to recreate that. So, what we did for that special sequence was, the brief was well, it needs to be like Avengers, just from a point of view we had never seen before. It needed to be seen through Kate’s eyes.
We managed to restore some geometry, but then we quickly realized that the Bishop house, the house where Kate lived, does not exist in real life. It’s a complete fabrication. So, we put it on top of one of the buildings.
Now, the environment created for Avengers was pretty impressive–Jeff White, our Vancouver head of studio, told me how the ILM team went and shot thousands of HDRIs at so hundreds of points across that swath of Manhattan. So, they’d start in the street, then from a skylift about 50’ off the ground, then they managed to get access to some rooftop. For us, unfortunately, we didn’t have that, because we didn’t have access to rooftops, and also it was a new space. So, we decided to go for a full CG approach, using a lot of photography as reference. And then we did something similar for Rockefeller Center. So, we matched what we knew, but then we went for a full CG render.
VINCENT PAPAIX
ILM visual effects supervisor
