Anthony Mackie has been portraying Sam Wilson and suiting up as Falcon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since the character first made his debut in 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Since then, the actor has gone on to reprise the role in a number of films, including Ant-Man, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. Because of his many appearances, his suit has undergone a number of changes along the way.
Sam Wilson's character arc has often been defined by the decisions made by Steve Rogers' Captain America, and we see that trend continue with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. However, with Falcon front and center in his own series (and upcoming film with Captain America 4), all eyes are on Mackie, meaning attention to detail when designing his wingsuit is more important than ever before.
When we had the opportunity to pick the brain of Charlie Tait, the VFX Supervisor for Weta Digital, we learned about the process behind making the wingsuit look real and seamless, especially when it comes to the shield and backpack transitions. It turns out that speed is key when it comes to how well the scenes are executed, with Tait even admitting that it wouldn't look correct if slowed down.
Literary Joe: For the specific beats where the wings are being used for defense, how did you go about the transition from wings to shield? Was that something difficult for you to make seamless?
Weta Digital: Yeah; it was not possible really to rig the wings to do that. So it's not like one set of wings that can do all these things. That was going to be just not possible.
So it was really just done by hand, honestly, in animation, taking pieces of the wing geometry, and in models, we took the wings that we had and would kind of deform them and break bits apart and try to create their shield-like shapes.
It was a very tricky exercise, you can't have the wings bent in half. They shouldn't look like they should be able to do that, but they need to be able to do this performance and act like bulletproof shields. So it was models and animation between them.
The wings weren't specifically rigged, even though I think it looks like they are, it looks like it's supposed to be able to do that, but we didn't make our model able to do that in any context, it's really a per shot thing done by hand, quite painstaking really.
And I think the way we get away with it is that it's done fast, the transition between say, if they're folded like a backpack to full shield is pretty quick, right? So he just puts his arms up in the things and it's really fast.
If we had to do it slowly, which of course wouldn't make sense if you're defending yourself from gunshots; but if we had to do it slowly, you'd see that there are various things not working probably quite how you imagine they should be.
It's just because it's fast that it works really well. Each piece is animated by hand, re-sculpted, modeled, and then that new model is animated by hand to make it work.
What do you guys make of these comments? Be sure to listen to our full interview on Literary Joe's Inner Child Podcast below. As always, share your thoughts in the usual spot!
Charlie Tait from Weta Digital stopped by to chat with us about his visual effects work on Disney and Marvel Studios' The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. We learned about the entire opening scene and how the canyon was built entirely with CGI. Charlie told us about Redwing and his weapon's carousel, building Falcon's new shield wings, and tons of interesting things!
All six episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier are now streaming on Disney+.