Just a warning — this article includes minor spoilers for "Avengers: Endgame."
SALT LAKE CITY — A pivotal moment in “Avengers: Endgame” sees the Avengers don shiny red and white spacesuits to travel through the Quantum Realm.
Surprise, though — each of those suits were computer-generated costumes.
According to Befores and Afters, the scenes featuring the time travel suits were shot long before it was determined what the suits would look like. Instead, visual effects studio Framestore was tasked with essentially dressing each actor for those moments.
"They just shot the actors in whatever costumes they were going to be wearing in the locations they were going to. Ant-Man had his Ant-Man costume, Thor had his bathrobe, Cap had his normal costume,” said Stuart Penn, a visual effects supervisor at Framestore.
Tracking markers were placed on characters’ costumes and VFX artists later added in digital models of the suits once they had been designed.
Interestingly enough, a practical suit never existed. Instead, the artists relied on Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and Black Widow’s (Scarlett Johansson) costumes to figure out how the time suits would move and react on screen.
Here are some other facts from the article:
- Besides wearing a digital suit, each character also received a CGI neck so the suit would blend properly with the actors’ faces.
- Movement animations were largely eyeballed, but some techniques were used to track the actors in some shots.
- In the scene where Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) returns to his home in the time suit, the track looked broken at first because of Renner’s frantic movements.
- The model for the time suit was designed the same way a practical suit would have been made so the simulated cloth would look authentic and move realistically.