GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VFX Team Discuss Rocket Raccoon and Groot
One of the things I'm looking forward to most about James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy film is seeing how they bring Rocket Raccoon and Groot to life on the big screen. I'm excited to see the effects they use, and how the character ends up looking. In a recent interview with Cinema Blend, The Avengers Executive Producer Victoria Alonso and ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Jeff White explained that the characters will be created with a blend of full computer graphics and motion capture. Here's how the conversation went down,
Cinema Blend: What makes me fascinated by the project is that you have five members of this team, and one of them is Rocket Raccoon, a talking raccoon, and another one is Groot, who is quite literally a walking tree. You’re obviously not putting a person in a costume for those parts. Are those going to be fully CG characters? Are there plans to use motion capture again?
Victoria Alonso: We’re going to do a combination. You can’t do any motion capture with a raccoon – they won’t let you put the suit on [laughs]. But we will do rotomation, probably, for some of the behavior. Rocket will have his own personality, of course, and clearly we can’t do mocap on a tree, per say, but we definitely will have performers to emulate what James Gunn will lead to be the behavior and the performance. He’s very clear on where he wants to take the characters.
Alonso then confirms that Gunn arrived in London to shoot the film, and that production has been going on already for a couple of months.
Production has already started! Completely. It started months ago and we have an entire team in London already – we start shooting in June. Our director [James Gunn] travels next week and it’s going, baby! It’s a fast train to a beautiful place.
Chris Pratt was recently cast in the role of Star-Lord, and we've heard that Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, and voice actor Jon Benjamin are up for the parts of Rocket and Groot. I'm sure the characters will turn out amazing. Guardians of the Galaxy will be released in 3D on August 1st, 2014.