This was the first foray into the Marvel universe for Cinesite. I spoke to the studio’s VFX Supervisor Simon Stanley-Clamp in London. Cinesite came in nine weeks before completion and finished off 104 shots, with 99 shots making the final movie cut, and two which were awarded on the final day of delivery. “This was a rolling kind of show with changes and some 911 VFX shout outs. With 17 facilities, Chris Townsend’s job as overall VFX Supervisor shielded a lot of us from the changes but we had constant contact with the busy man himself, almost every day,” says Stanley-Clamp. “There were two 2K dailies run every single day of production.”

Weta’s seaport sequence was shared out to Cinesite as well. The job of bringing the green-screen elements together from turnover takes on the location was coupled with placing the Weta seaport crane models, straight onto the LiDAR ground scans. Some elements had to be moved so they were matte painted out and recreated in CG, textured and placed in the new spots. “A sequence like that went quickly through our environment department, about ten days,” he continues.

The sequence was complex for not only Weta but also Cinesite, as they were nesting the green-screen elements back into CG environment. It was a moving view, based on a helicopter aerial view, and many elements required a measured amount of repositioning, warping and resizing.