Avengers of the Infinity War’s release
Infinity War’s reveals how much of the film is CGI may be even more than audieces might expect.
Along with Avengers the Infinity War’s home release, Marvel has created a ton of new material, including deleted scenes, audio commentary, and the “Beyond the Battle” featurettes, which explore the creation of key scenes in the film. This supplementary material contains wealth of new information about the third Avengers film.
Blockbuster movies tend to have lots of CGI in order to bring their worlds to life on the big screen and superhero movies have to take the visual effects even further to bring viewers to new worlds.
That’s why superhero movie productions tend to hire several VFX vendors to work on various aspects of a film. For Infinity War, that meant contracting practically every major vendor on the planet. But it also meant coming to close to tying the last Avengers film for having the most visual effects shots.
In one new discovery from these behind-the-scenes features, executive producer Victoria Alonso commented on the amount of CGI used in the film. During the “Beyond the Battle: Wakanda” featurette, Alonso mentions that there were 3,000 shots in the film and a whopping 2,900 visual effects shots. By comparison, Avengers: Age of Ultron had over 3,000 VFX shots. In the “Beyond the Battle: Titan” featurette, Alonso describes Infinity War as one CGI scene, saying: “This entire movie is one big CG scene. The environment is CG, the weapons are CG, every shot is dense in layers.”
Infinity War explores a number of fantastic worlds that would not be possible without computer-generated images, and it also features many colorful and strange characters that are dependent on CGI, including Thanos and his Black Order. The eponymous Infinity Stones, too, are computer-generated, with enhancements for Captain America’s new shields and Thor’s hammer Mjolnir. Reflecting on the events, settings, and characters in the film, perhaps it isn’t all that surprising that practically the whole movie is CGI.
While some recent films, including The Hobbit trilogy, have been criticized for their use of CGI, Infinity War’s use of CGI was not met with the same criticism. Of course, some fans believe that Marvel has a CGI problem, relying too heavily on expensive computer-generated sequences in recent years, but the quality of the film’s CGI effects is definitely a step above The Hobbit’s animated sequences, primarily because they used as many practical effects as possible (at least as much as a superhero movie on this scale can allow). Whether or not Infinity War uses too much CGI may be up for debate, but with over 2,900 VFX shots, the film is definitely reliant on computers to produce its many worlds and characters.
KEY RELEASE DATES
Captain Marvel (2019) release date: Mar 08, 2019
The Avengers 4 / Untitled Avengers Movie (2019) release date: May 03, 2019
Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) release date: Jul 05, 2019.
