Production Profile: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

by Kyle Kull

As time moves forward, the film industry continues to grow, becoming more advanced. The visual effects (VFX) of each film continue to bring their respective directors' visions to the screen, allowing flexibility for their cinema. The new Marvel film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), is a good example of how the directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, were able to use computer-generated imagery (CGI) to fulfill the demands of their story.

The VFX of Captain America were completed by the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), which has worked previously on films such as Pirates of the Caribbean (Gore Verbinski, 2003) and Rango (Gore Verbinski, 2011), and has won a multitude of Oscars for best VFX for films like The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989)and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993). The company began as a division of Lucasfilm, which George Lucas created when he was working on Star Wars (1977), and it eventually evolved into the company that it is now. ILM has become one of the most successful VFX companies in the world. Within the company, Dan Deleeuw was the VFX supervisor for Captain America, having previously helped with projects such as Iron Man 3 (Shane Black, 2013), Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005) and Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998). Let’s look at a few ways in which CGI and VFX were used for this film.

As with most of the blockbuster films nowadays, a majority of the shots in the film were VFX enhanced, providing more to each shot than was actually there during production. Deleeuw estimated that there were about 2500 frames in Captain America that used CGI in order to bring the story of superheroes to the screen. While only 900 of these were enhanced by the team at ILM, this rough count gives you an idea of how important the VFX studios have become to the completion of a film. Nowadays, even when a film does not revolve around supernatural people or events, there is still a large amount of CGI and VFX used. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) is a great example of this (an explanation can be seen here:  http://www.cinemablography.org/3/post/2014/02/the-end-of-an-era.html).

An interesting new tactic that has not been used extensively due to its difficulty and a typical film production’s time restraints, was the use of a variety of digital doubles. Although the production team still used stunt doubles as they do in most action movies, there were simply some shots in the film that could not be achieved with practical means. While at first they simply wanted to do some of the action shots with the digital double in order to minimize the amount of visibility to its falseness, when they saw the double on the computers, they realized how realistic the VFX team made the double. They were given some confidence with the digital double, and eventually even used the digital double for some close ups. This may raise the question, if we are able to create digital persons that look so realistic that audiences don’t notice, does this mean we have entered a filmmaking era where we simply don’t need actors anymore, but only digital doubles?

CGI was utilized for many of the shots, as was stated earlier. A magnificent vehicle that was seen in the film, was a flying aircraft carrier, with battleship guns mounted to its sides. In previous films, such as The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012), the aircraft carriers were simply actual aircraft carriers that were then digitally placed in the sky. However with the addition of the guns, it was impossible for the VFX team to repeat this process, and so they decided to use a fully digital aircraft carrier.

A common term that is used in the film industry is “we’ll fix it in post”, simply meaning that what they were unable to achieve in production, they will digitally fix during post-production. With a film having this enormous of a budget, this is completely possible. Producers on set of Captain America were trying to get aerial views of Washington D.C. but due to air traffic restrictions, they were having difficulty getting clearance. So instead, they elected to simply achieve those aerial views in post-production. So the shots in the film of Washington D.C., are not actually the capitol, but rather digital copies of the capitol.

There was an enormous amount of VFX and CGI in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, even more than what I laid out here. If you go see the popular film in theaters, look for these VFX techniques, so that you may have a broader view of how the production team was able to create the story and images that you see on the screen. Check out the trailer below in case you haven’t yet seen it.