How the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3’ visual effects team designed Rocket’s evolution [Exclusive Video Interview]
Stephane Ceretti earned an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects for 2014’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” before sitting out the 2017 sequel. But he returned as visual effects supervisor on “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” to close out James Gunn‘s trilogy about everyone’s favorite space misfits. “To do the end of the ‘Guardians’ trilogy was very exciting for me and working [again] with the actors and characters we had created on the first film,” Ceretti tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above) alongside collaborators Alexis Wajsbrot, Guy Williams and Theo Bialek. “We were very excited to bring in some of our best friends in the business. Some of them had worked with us before.”
The two-time Oscar nominee recruited Framestore (Wajsbrot), Weta FX (Williams) and Sony Pictures Imageworks (Bialek) to work on the film. It was a given that Framestore would return as the VFX house created Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper) for the first movie. “Vol. 3” is very much Rocket’s movie, as it tells his backstory from the time he was a baby raccoon and reveals the dastardly experiments performed on him by the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji).
“We started by finding a really cute raccoon and we created what we called Rocket Runt. That was our starting point,” Wajsbrot explains. “Then we actually did blendshape to the actual Rocket we all know and we started to look at which different phase would be interesting. There were also some great sketches from James Gunn, from the production designer, from the art department from Marvel that we also used as reference.”
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To show Rocket’s transformation post-experiment, Wajsbrot and his team had to think about how to turn a four-legged creature into a two-legged one. “We knew that it needed to go from a character on all fours to a bipedal character, so what kind of implants would help that transformation? We had these implants to exert the shoulders to be more human, something for the thumb to be a bit more human, something to stretch his legs as well,” he continues. “But I think the main thing for us was really the animation and finding the emotion in Sean Gunn‘s body performance and Bradley Cooper’s facial performance. Steph is always trying to bring in more of the animalistic nature of the raccoon. The more baby it is, the more raccoon it’s supposed to be and the more painful one on all fours. And then, the more he grows up, the more adult and the more Bradley Cooper/Sean Gunn it needs to be. Finding the balance between all of this was really interesting and a great challenge.”
Weta and Imageworks were tasked with building new locations for the film. The former worked on Arête Laboratories, the High Evolutionary’s spaceship where a bulk of the third-act action takes place. “[Arête] is this 3-kilometer wide spaceship that we started seeing as a 200-meter tall office building in the middle of a harbor,” Williams shares. “The challenge there was we knew there were times we’d see it really close up and times we’d see it really far away. We had to make sure it was always a compelling image. And the production design for it was fantastic, so you’re starting with something that looks absolutely gorgeous and you know you can’t just slap a building on it that has some red glass on it. We were trying to leverage that almost jewel-like imagery of it.”
Imageworks created Orgoscope, the planet that is home to Orgocorp and is made out of living matter. Like Williams, Bialek had to take into account distance in the design. “The concept artwork was really useful, definitely on this film more so than others. I think James pretty much has a clear vision and he locks into what he wants early on, so that was really beneficial to us,” he states. “But the real challenge was seeing that in different scales and trying to understand that space when you’re up close or on the ground or really far away. It was trying to figure out how to represent those shapes and those objects so that you recognize them as the material, like it’s bone or muscle. Sometimes you see it close up, sometimes it’s far away, so it’s that challenge of how do you still make it register as that material regardless of the distance you are from it.”
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