*I don't want to complain about a successful billion-dollar pop-culture enterprise, but if you ask me, this extensive, explicit backstage description of contemporary top-end FX work is considerably more interesting than the movie.
*Really enjoying the jargon there. "We wanted to make sure the water had progression." Of course the water required progression. You betcha.
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/vfx-roll-call-for-the-avengers/
(...)
"The vast majority of the New York of Avengers is digital. About ten city blocks by about four blocks was digitally re-created. “I had just finished Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” recalls White, “and it was great in Chicago – since you could just fly your helicopter over the streets, but in New York you are not allowed to take your helicopter lower than 500ft above the tops of the buildings, so we knew right away that there was going to be a lot of building reconstruction since there are several sequences flying around the buildings.”
"To rebuild the streets, ILM sent a team into New York to photograph the city. “It was the ultimate culmination of building on the virtual background technology (at ILM),” says White. “We started with the biggest photography shoot I know we have done here, which was 8 weeks with four photographers out in the streets of New York.” The team shot some 1800 x 360 degree Pano-spheres of NY, using the Canon 1D with a 50mm lens – tiled, and as an HDR bracketed set.
"The ILM team worked their way down the streets at street level – shooting every 100 feet down the road, and then started again doing the same street via a man lift at a height of 120 ft, then they would move to shoot every building roof top. But given how long it takes to do a bracketed tiled set of images, especially in sometimes high wind, it was not as simple as just moving down a street. By the time the team would get to the end of the street it would have taken so long that the sun would have completely shifted, thus making one end of the street lit from morning sun, but the end of the same street lit from the opposite side by afternoon light. To allow for this the team had to zig zag across New York, and try to capture most of the streets from the roughly same time of day, but on different days.
"Even this was greatly complicated by changing weather. Once all the images were captured, tiled and combined, another team set to removing (painting out) all the ground level people, cars and objects. Then a third team would re-populate the streets with digital assets ready to be seen in perspective or perhaps blown up. ILM came up with complex algorithmic traffic scripts to populate streets and create the sort of traffic grid lock any real world incident like this would naturally cause...."
(...)
"“The trick to creating believable large vehicles such as the Helicarrier is to always incorporate features and aspects that are present in similar real-world objects (if they exist, that is),” says Janek Sirrs. “Design-wise, the Art Department referenced Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, which are about the same size as the Helicarrier, as the basis for the look of the flight deck. And that immediately created a foundation that the audience would be familiar with, making the whole thing an easier sell, as opposed to something more science fiction looking.”
“If you carry this philosophy through to the smaller details as well,” adds Sirrs, (((and I'd argue that it actually is something like a "philosophy," probably because, as a creative, I agree with it))) then that’s how you preserve the sense of scale no matter how wide, or tight the shot. For example, simply having flight crew moving around on the deck instantly clues in the audience to the size of the Helicarrier as they know big a person is. Even without people present, everyday objects like handrails, windows, etc. all achieve the same purpose as you inherently have preconceived notions about how large they are, and the brain works out the rest relative to those familiar objects.
"It’s equally important to convey some sense of how the Helicarrier is fabricated/constructed. Again, if you can steal from the real world, the end result will be more convincing. For example, the hull of the Helicarrier is built of built of many panels welded together in exactly the same manner as a large ship...."
