Ant-Man and the Wasp's Director Breaks Down the Kitchen Fight Scene

Hi, I'm Peyton Reed, director of Ant Man

and now Ant Man and the Wasp,

and this is Notes On a Scene.

(dramatic music)

(punching and grunting)

So this scene is the Wasp kitchen fight,

which is a crucial part of the movie.

Hope Van Dyne, played by Evangeline Lilly

and her father Hank Pym, played by Michael Douglas.

They are constructing this quantum tunnel.

There's one crucial component

that they still need for the machine.

And because they've had to go underground

and keep one step ahead of the FBI,

they're now forced to deal with these black market dealers

to get their technology.

This unfortunately forces Hope to don the suit as Wasp

and take care of business in her own very particular way.

(dramatic music)

(electric discharge)

(crashing)

She flicks a salt shaker.

Here a henchman is getting away and watch this, right here.

There are these particular Pym technology gauntlets

that shoot shrink and grow discs.

She blasts this blue grow disc

and I'm gonna show you the point of contact here.

There goes the salt shaker and boom, right here,

this is a Pym grow disc.

It makes contact with the salt shaker, boom,

and there you have a gigantic salt shaker.

Bang, it takes care of this guy.

Now obviously to shoot this scene we had our actor run,

and we actually had a piece of plexiglass

that he could run into so we could get a little bit

of the indentation of his face here,

and obviously CG-wise we put in the giant salt shaker later.

The key thing in this was to sort of

keep things moving really really quickly.

(electric discharge)

(air whooshing)

(wings fluttering)

Here comes yet another guy into the kitchen,

she spots him, he picks up a knife,

we see he throws the knife.

This is a combination of Evangeline Lilly

in a suit, and then when we get here,

we do a little bit of what's called motion capture,

and that's what you've seen a million times,

with an actor in a suit that may be covered

with ping-pong balls for good measure,

so that we're shooting her and digitally capturing her

and doing all these movements.

Now, let's talk about this.

We used to call these, we still do, disco trails.

In the first Ant Man, we wanted to do something

that sort of keyed off the comics

where you see Ant Man shrink and in a single panel

of the comics, you'd have this sort of echo effect.

And it's something we started to refine with Wasp.

And we wanted to figure out in the movie version

kind of paying homage to that thing

you saw on the comic page

but still having it appear photo-realistic.

So we do a transfer here where our guy here is real,

but the knife is digital.

With visual effects, the world around you wants

to be real and tactile because we're not in outer space,

we're not in Asgard, we're in the real world

that we see every day, so it has to feel real.

So we'll shoot real elements of a real knife

with motion picture digital capture,

and also still digital capture just

to get the textures correct so they feel real.

People ask about Wasp, you know, what part is Evangeline,

what part is stunt person, what part is motion capture,

and what part is pure digital animation?

And it really within, it can change within one shot.

Like this shot here, at a certain point,

is not motion capture, this is all digital animation.

We scan Evangeline and scan the suit obviously

and all the textures in the suit.

And then our genius visual effects artist

can create an entirely digital Wasp here,

but from photographic elements.

A little side note here, when we shot our actual scene,

our stunt gentleman threw the knife

and held his arm out like that.

We needed to know he was gonna throw three different knives,

so we had to digitally change his arm,

so he threw it and then brought it back down,

a stupid detail that you really would never know,

but his arm becomes digital as it goes own there.

(wings fluttering)

(pot clanging)

So here, one of the keys was, this was the first time

really the audience is gonna see her in action in macro.

And we wanted to sort of demonstrate here

the wings, and the whole apparatus,

so the wings as they come out,

watch just sort of the flexibility of the wings,

and the movement there.

In the early comic books, the wings are organic,

and they actually come out of her body.

That just seemed gross to us, we didn't want to do that,

we wanted to actually make it part of Pym's technology

that he does, so here, really,

it was important for the artist

to get the mechanics of that so they felt real and tactile.

But also it was really fun to fracture time

and slow it down and see that she's so fast and nimble,

she can not only dodge one knife,

and a second knife, but then sort of literally

be a blade runner and run across the knife itself.

And then as she's doing that, spot the next thing.

The key to the sequence was really

to keep constant thing coming at her

and she's able to dodge and deal with them

and then see ordinary kitchen items

and figure out how to use them as weapons.

She dodges that one, activates her wings

and then has to dodge and then run, here,

she spots this handle on this pot here,

and takes this guy out.

So in this shot of Wasp here,

this is a digital Wasp with of course,

Evangeline's face in there.

We didn't want to make a movie where she's out

of the suit, it's Evangeline,

and when she's in the suit, it just feels disconnected.

It was always important to go to close ups.

And you want to see the actor, you want to see Paul Rudd,

you want to see Evangeline Lilly in there

to keep the personality alive.

We do a thing called the array.

Which is, we sit them in a chair

with a lot of bright light, five different cameras

on their face, and anytime they're in the suit

in the movie, we run through and shoot their face,

saying the lines, doing the expressions,

so we have this whole catalog of expressions and lines

that we put into them as digital characters.

So again important to see Evangeline there in the mask.

(dramatic music)

(crashing)

This is almost entirely a practical top shot.

These are real vegetables, some carrots and tomatoes here.

And then it becomes digital here,

so that's a digital tomato you see here,

and then keeping track of her moves,

dodging all these vegetables as we go through.

So one of the things we're able to do

with Ant Man and the Wasp is really try

and put the audience down there so

that they hopefully can feel what it's like to be shrunk.

And not just standing around, but really involved

in these kinetic, acrobatic flight scenes.

With our motion picture cameras,

and then our visual effects still cameras,

we'll shoot on a set or a location.

So you have all these surfaces here,

you have the wooden cutting block,

and you have the stainless steel counter.

And we'll tile these things so we actually have

photographic capture of all the different surfaces.

And then we'll take these and create digital environments

and so we can get our virtual camera down

where we just physically wouldn't be able

to get a real camera down and treat them

like gigantic sets, but put the audience

in the middle of the action here.

As she flips and slides under this thing here,

we're here with a digital Wasp

but real Evangeline Lilly face,

and we come out and play here POV as she's sliding

toward this cutting board.

And then we go wide.

So it really is like shooting a normal action sequence,

wide shots, medium shots, POVs, all that stuff.

But in this macro environment.

(squishing)

(dramatic music)

Again, here, always crucial to see

a close up of Evangline reacting

to the impending danger here of a meat tenderizer.

One of the deadliest weapons you can find in a kitchen.

And now she just dodges this thing,

and then as we learn in the first movie,

when you're small you can bullet through things

and be very dense and powerful.

She bullets through a bag of flour here.

That's a practical bag of flour

that we actually put a little charge in

and shot flour out.

It's augmented with some additional digital flour

and a digital Wasp there.

The stuntman actually did get a face full

of actual, real flour.

That was crucial to the scene.

(grunting)

All right.

And here now, in this sort of dust

and flour, you see Wasp come in here.

One of the cool things about the process,

as I said, we storyboard and we pre-vis out these sequences.

But there's a tremendous amount of fluidity

to the process that you can come up

with a new and maybe better idea

or different idea for a sequence.

Mid-way through the process, even late in the game,

if we feel like we don't have enough coverage,

and we don't have enough of her POV.

And I say that because this shot

was one that we really wanted to have

and it's a really simple shot of just her

coming through the flour, spotting the next bit

of action she was gonna take care of

and really like Shot A leads to B leads to C there.

We used a lot of thing when we're macro,

we call them motes, like dust motes.

When you're sitting in a room and maybe the sun's coming

through a window, you know how you can actually see dust

floating around.

It's really important to make this look

as photographic as possible, and what those things

would look like if you're really small

and playing depth of field, to really sell the idea

that she's tiny.

All right.

(wings fluttering)

(explosion)

Now, this is interesting to me.

Hopefully to you too.

One of the fun things too in visual effects reviews

is to sort of see here's the first pass

and there's fire and my response was, you know, more fire,

let's really get this guy.

They were able to really control the level of flame here

with the digital fire.

There's actually a little bit of practical fire

on his arm right here, a little bit there,

but it's augmented by digital fire.

(explosion)

(wings fluttering)

This is a couple of my favorite shots in the sequence.

So she flies down here and lands and skids,

and it's a very, very simple effect,

but one of the things we always look for

when we're creating small Ant Man or small Wasp

is trying to make the physics seem correct.

Here, it was important to sort of have her fly in,

land here, and slide like an Olympic skater.

And you know, that's the scan of Evangeline Lilly,

that's her moving with motion capture

and her face digitally put in the mask here.

And these little sort of touchstone shots

within these sequences where you really feel the weight

and the physics that hopefully register as correct,

bring it to life.

Then she leaps here, and as she leaps, grows

and you can see this sort of,

what again we were calling the disco trail effect

as she leaps up toward this guy,

you see multiple versions and it's meant to sort of,

it happened so quickly that the eye sort of sees

these different frames there.

And then she grows into a stunt shot.

(grunting and crashing)

Part of it is not just demonstrating

her shrinking and growing and flying capabilities,

Evangeline and I talked a lot

about her fighting style, that it was very precise

and decisive and lethal, really giving the audience

the idea that she's been waiting a long time to do this.

And now that the time has come,

she really kind of enjoys it.

And she can take care of business.

Every single shot we shoot in the movie,

let's say it's a simple shot of an actor

moving and talking, we shoot the shot

until we get it right, then we have the actor step out

and we do what's called a clean plate.

And we do the exact same camera move

with no one in it, and at the front end

and the back end of that shot, we move the camera

around the edges of that frame and we tile it.

And what that does is it gives us flexibility

to change shots and move digital characters

within the shot later in post production as we're editing.

So here's an example of that.

Here he's swinging and originally in the plate

our stuntperson is here, full-sized, you could see

that he's got an eye-line to her there.

We decided to shrink her down in post-production

just to add, you know, more excitement to the fight.

And then we grow her back at this point.

She comes in here, and then this arm here

is digital, so we, this is all digital Wasp here.

And we've animated the arm coming up to grab

and then here it segues into our actual stunt shot

where she physically blocks his arm.

So there's a digital handoff in that shot I believe,

in one of these frames right here.

It becomes so seamless that after awhile,

you get really used to the shot and can't remember exactly

what frame it is.

(crashing and punching)

(grunting and crashing)

So that was a fun thing to do

that we could design these fights really specifically

and shoot them that way on the set

and then continue to augment them all

throughout post-production.

And of course, all throughout this sequence still

in the background is our friend the gigantic salt shaker.

Which, this is another thing, when you create these scenes

where they shrink or grow something,

and it's done, you're stuck with it

for the rest of the sequence,

so then suddenly you have to animate

this gigantic salt shaker in the back of the shot there.

Digital effects artists love it.

After this punch, this becomes just sort of

quick, cut action fighting.

(punching and grunting)

And that is Ingrid Kleinig,

one of Evangeline's stunt doubles and she's amazing

and can do these incredible high kicks.

She's fast and she's lethal,

but also there's sort of a balletic quality

to the way she moves.

(crashing)

So the idea was that this character

be smart and decisive.

It's a pleasure doing business with you, Sonny.

She goes into that transaction

with the money, she just wants it to be

a normal, above board transaction.

But when things go awry, she's prepared

to deal with it as a last resort, and she does.