AVENGERS: ENDGAME VFX Artists Credit THE LORD OF THE RINGS Films For Inspiration In Working on the Movie
Weta Digital is the incredible VFX team behind many of the most amazing visual effects you’ve seen in films over the last 25 years. Their most recent piece of work was on the worldwide hit movie, knocking out all the box office records, Avengers: Endgame. In a recent interview with cinemablend, Matt Aiken, the visual effects supervisor over at Weta, was asked if there were any non-marvel films that inspired the work they did on Endgame, specifically the final battle. Aiken responded by saying:
A bunch of us, myself included, go all the way back to Lord of the Rings at WETA Digital. That had giant battle sequences, predominantly CG battle sequences as well. It was interesting, we really felt like we were back in the territory of Helm’s Deep and the Battle of Pelennor Fields at times on this film, which was fun for a bunch of us who’d worked on those films as well. And we’re using some of the same techniques and software in Lord of the Rings. We’re using MASSIVE, which is the crowd-simulation software that we developed in house at WETA Digital to do those battle scenes for Lord of the Rings to do the crowd simulation work for Endgame as well. It’s a way more developed version of that, but it’s still plenty of the same software.
Aiken went on to talk about learning from another film, but still keeping the individuality of the film you’re working on, and making it look unique to the needs of the film:
And then things we learned from Lord of the Rings that we were able to bring to bear here as well. The one thing we always like to do is when we have these big battle scenes is not to just treat everybody the same, so in Endgame, we’ve got multiple different flavors of army on both sides, both Thanos’ side and our heroes’ side. We’ve got Wakandans, Asgardians, Ravagers, sorcerers on the heroes’ side, and we’ve got Chitauri, Outriders, Sakaarans, the Black Order on Thanos’ side. And we want to preserve the individual fighting styles for each of these sub-armies, if you like, so that when we have a clash, we can tell if it’s a bunch of Outriders dealing to some sorcerers, or maybe we’ve got some Wakandans who are able to take on a whole lot of Chitauri.
That’s pretty awesome. Both LOTR and the Avengers sagas were amazing, and it’s just incredible to me what can be created by filmmakers and visual effects artists.