Exclusive: Industrial Light & Magic Makes Hulk Smash!

[Male] There was an idea to bring together

a group of remarkable people.

(hard rock music)

The Avengers is really the culmination

of a few films that have come before

that really set up the story.

So it's bringing together Captain America,

Thor, you know Black Widow, Hulk,

Hawkeye, Nick Fury is part of it,

Agent Coulson is part of it.

The films are so huge now, and have so many shots

that usually one house can't take on everything.

We had Iron Man from the previous film.

We had built on kind of what we developed

for the first two films.

What was great about this one was he had a brand-new suit.

He has brand-new ways to put it on and take it off

that were really fun to come up with.

But he's the hard surface creature.

You don't see his eyes.

And so when we started bidding the work,

the character we really wanted to do was the Hulk.

(suspenseful music)

A lot of it was working with Mark.

We set out from the beginning, and knew that

we needed to have an actor do this performance.

He and Joss would talk a lot about anger,

and what type of anger is this Hulk.

A lot of it came from how Mark was playing Bruce Banner.

You know, that kind of world weary, kind of tired,

accepting of the fact that he's got the Hulk inside of him,

and that's part of who he is.

We did photo shoots where we shot basically everything.

You know, the area between his fingers.

He opened his mouth.

We shot his gums and his teeth.

You know, the corners of his eyes.

Everything we could find to make sure

that Hulk was based on him.

But on top of that, also did a life cast.

Life cast is a molding process where

we can actually put a plaster and they use a lot

of very high-tech materials to do it now.

But we take our CG mark, and we take the life cast scan,

and we kind of clone over the really high-frequency detail.

I mean one of the great things that Joss did

right from the beginning was say, Mark Ruffalo

should be part of the design, which was new.

'Cause the last two films, you didn't see

as much of the actor in the Hulk design.

And so by incorporating Mark into it,

we added the same sort of little bits of gray

in the temples of Hulk's hair that Mark Ruffalo has.

All these things that we don't typically do,

but it really lended a lot of credibility to the character

because in the end I think, that decision to really look

at Mark Ruffalo and trying to incorporate

everything we could from him made a big difference.

(dramatic music)

(bombs exploding)

I'd say New York was probably our other

big challenge on the film,

in that the whole last 1/3 of the movie

is generally set in New York,

but we only shot there for three or four days

the in principal photography.

So the rest of New York, if you're flying around,

or it's an aerial shot, or we're down

on Park Avenue viaduct, like in the trailer

there's that shot where it circles around all the Avengers,

that whole area was shot on a green screen in New Mexico.

The way we did it was we had a team of four guys

go out to New York, and they spend eight weeks shooting

the kind of like, you know Google street view,

you have those spheres you can look around?

It's like a super high-resolution version of that.

And it's the same idea.

Like every 100 feet or so, we'd shoot another

super high-resolution sphere of photography.

And then we had Lidar go in and scan all the buildings.

So we had geometry to start with,

and we had all this photography,

then we'd project the photography onto the buildings,

and that's how we'd make our background plates.

And then on the street level

we had to get rid of all the cars.

People, dressing, everything, put back in the streets,

and then dress it out.

We ended up building taxi cabs, cop cars,

trees, sandwich boards, construction equipment,

and everything we found in New York,

we would build to dress out those backgrounds.

I mean our goal in the end was to make it feel like

you couldn't tell that it wasn't entirely shot in New York.

It's extremely complicated and time-consuming

to try and do everything in CG,

so we certainly film everything that's real that we can.

I think the best effects work always, you know,

has some component of reality

to kind of hinge everything around.

Even if it's the photography we used,

rather than building an entirely CG New York,

starting from all that photography really gave us something

to kind of anchor the shots around.

I think that makes a big difference.

With that sort of focus in mind,

and the goal for each project,

you really can take on any kind of things

you want to create.

(bombs exploding)

(gunfire)

(dramatic music)

(ambient music)