Gunn has posted a little bit of behind the scenes stuff of actually shooting for the rotoscope with Rooker on set. He doesn’t have to be blue, which is great. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about the actual production?
This was a pretty tight production in terms of our turnaround time. It was really cool. When they liked the test, and we started talking about the actual production of the featurette, it became clear, and we were huge advocates for shooting a practical set or shooting the sequence, because a couple of the trickier parts creatively were, number one, it is a flashback. So we knew that we were going to have to de-age Sean Gunn’s Kraglin character. Furthermore, the actor who played young Peter is now a teenager or young 20-year-old kid. So they had another wonderfully talented young actor stand in for him for the shoot, but we did want to pay homage to the original actor.
The two things that were tricky were capturing the performance, we knew this going in, and then having to create an artistic representation of them, but looking like younger versions of themselves, if that makes sense. Marvel very graciously set up a shoot in Georgia on one of their big lots where they were filming “Guardians 3.” So we got to go into a big warehouse sound stage. They had pre-taped-off the sets where people would sit and that kind of stuff. But we had very minimal props. The prop department was there. But it was almost like shooting on a green screen, in a way.
It was really cool. It was very collaborative. We got to work and sit with James directly, and talk about the direction of the camera and things of that nature, making sure that it was simple enough for animation, but also dynamic enough so it had that big cinematic feel.
We got the shoot. They edited and provided us the footage. Then we launched, pretty immediately thereafter, with a lean team of animators. We did collaborate with a studio, Studio Moshi in Australia, because another thing that became evident from the test was that I certainly was not going to be able to animate this thing single-handedly.
We had an incredible team there, but all in all, it was still small. It was only about 10 or 12 people in total, working pretty tirelessly around the clock. I think it was approximately four months. But yeah. We went ahead, and we divided up the scenes accordingly. We tried to cast them based on different artist strengths and weaknesses.
Again, coming back to now we’re rotoscoping, but we’re also drawing to designs, as opposed to the live-action footage, in a sense. Because Kraglin, I had to design him as a younger version of Sean Gunn, which had a little bit of back and forth, but again, Marvel was great in terms of their feedback, and very supportive of that.
Then I had to find a lot of stock footage and imagery of the actor who played young Peter, and so we were drawing over this actor’s performance, but then trying to make it look like the original actor. That was interesting.