There’s a reason why Avengers: Infinity War is one of the most expensive movies ever made. At an estimated budget of between $300 and $400 million, Infinity War is Marvel’s biggest film, both in terms of investment and box office returns, which recently crossed $2 billion. It took 13 visual effects companies, including industry mainstays such as Industrial Light & Magic, Digital Domain and Weta Digital, to create the film’s over 2680 VFX shots.
Several before-and-after images of the film’s elaborate effects have been shared online. In a recent batch of images we can see Josh Brolin’s villainous Thanos, dressed in motion capture tights, interacting with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor and his daughter, Gamora. We also see how a lot of green screen work went into the film, especially in the final showdown with Thanos on his planet, Titan.
Digital Domain was the company that handled the 400 plus shots required to render Brolin’s performance into an entirely CG character. “We took the helmet-cam data, which is quite low-resolution, to create a facial motion mesh. Then you feed that through a machine-learning algorithm, which finds the appropriate fit with the high-resolution shape,” Kelly Port, visual effects supervisor at Digital Domain told CNET.
A previously released set of pictures, courtesy Art of VFX, show how Thanos’ henchmen - Ebony Maw, Corvus Glaive, Proxima Midnight and Cull Obsidian - were created, and how the directors Joe & Anthony Russo chose to combine visual effects with real, physical environments.
The 13 companies that worked on Infinity War, and the upcoming Avengers 4, are Perception, Cinesite, Digital Domain, Double Negative, Elstree Effects, Framestore, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Method Studios, RISE Visual Effects Studios, ScanlineVFX, Lola Visual Effects, Territory Studio and Weta Digital.