Guardians of the Galaxy Vfx Breakdown by Framestore
Framestore Studio created most complicated environment for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and then staged a dog-fight that explored every inch of it. Here Framestore linked up all our shots in the 4-mile wide and 1.2 billion polygon world.
The chase takes place at hundreds of miles an hour and so from shot to shot the action might travel a quarter of the way around the environment, meaning you soon see every part of it. The camera takes in all the geometry, from large-scale things such as the towers right down to individual railings, light fittings and doors.
It was built modularly, from 250 separate models based on art department designs such as towers, pillars, turbines, little huts and railings. The complete VFX Lego kit if you will. Each large element like a tower could be dressed with smaller ones like pipes to create the favela-like slums of each unique Knowhere district. Those 250 distinct models were used 85,000 times to build a city that numbered 1.2 billion polygons at render time. That’s a lot of Lego bricks. Then there’s the lighting. First the individual window lights, then the 10,000+ street lights placed by hand.
Animating the vehicles brought its own challenge. As it is essentially fighter planes flown by experienced pilots against our heroes in unfamiliar mining craft you had to feel that contrast. “Imagine the mining pods as super-charged forklift trucks, being driven by a formula one racer having to make it around some really tight corners” suggests pod chase Animation Supervisor, Dale Newton.
The Necrocraft are a different matter entirely. “Believe it or not James Gunn gave us the reference of flies on shit, shot in slow motion,” says Dale. “It was an incredibly astute reference because if you watch flies they turn their heads in the direction they are going to fly to and then adjust their body and there’s this period of overshoot as they’re quite heavy compared to their thrust, it was perfect for the vehicles. Unfortunately we did have to look at a pile of shit for a long time to get the logic right.”
“We really tried to draw you into it,” he continues, “we played the camera in most of the shots as if it was on another vehicle to really give a sense of being in there. We added camera shakes too, so there’s a bit of ambient movement as if you were on another ship but you got rocked by other vehicles coming by to you get this immersive feeling.”
A fun little problem to solve was how Rocket was going to fly the pod as they, understandably, weren’t designed with space raccoons in mind. In the end we got him to clamber right up on the control panel, which put him in an awesome pose, “almost like he’s riding a super bike” as Dale puts it.
The balance of the fight tips as our heroes realise they are essentially piloting wrecking balls – robust enough to smash through another vehicle unharmed. Smart thinking, but also the source of another big FX challenge for us: super detailed slow motion explosions.
We enhanced fLush again to handle this, with our R&D and FX teams working together to make sure as much detail could be retained throughout the explosion. “The other difficulty is that no-one knows what a slow-motion explosion really looks like” explains FX Supervisor Erwann. “There have been lots of tests done at 1000 frames a second, but you can never see the level of detail we needed here. And of course no-one has ever filmed a spaceship crashing through another in slow-motion because it has never happened! It took us months to get it perfect and we needed a lot detail, smoke and fire, dust and debris, but it has turned out to be a very cool shot.”
