Earlier this year, Marvel Studios’ “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” came under serious fire for the poor quality of its visual effects.
The complaints followed in the wake of growing discussion online by effects techs speaking out about problems with the VFX industry working conditions as a whole, combined with Marvel ramping up the number of projects it has in the pipeline.
A big part of the issue was that filmmakers and studio executives reportedly ‘nitpicked’ and revise vast swaths of some Marvel films without putting aside enough time to implement the changes well. One artist told Vulture there’s a “lot of reworking, a lot of inefficiency” resulting in some shots having to be “redone 20 times to get the look that they want”.
That isn’t a problem it seems with James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”. In an interview with Collider, Gunn was asked about the VFX industry’s struggles and how that impacted his production.
Gunn says the majority of the film’s 3,000+ VFX shots used Weta FX and Framestore (with some assist from Sony Picture Imageworks and ILM) whom he’s worked with on several movies. He also goes in knowing what he wants along with respecting the artists, their work and time considerations:
“I’m really pretty specific from the beginning about what I want, and my movie doesn’t change a lot like other movies do. We don’t have this thing where we’re constantly shifting everything around like happens in a lot of big movies because test screenings aren’t going well. Test screenings went great, everybody liked the movie.
…I think sometimes what you see in films is, you’ll see sections where the visual effects look great and then you get to a section that’s like, ‘What is going on?’ And a lot of times you find out that’s because they didn’t put that section in until a month before they had to lock the film.
I really do everything I can not to do that. I don’t go to set without a finished – I want the script to be finished at least six months before I shoot, always. Because I don’t understand rewriting while you’re shooting and all that because it just messes up the movie.
If you’re spending this much money on a movie, then you’ve got to treat it with respect, and you’ve gotta have things prepped as well as you possibly can. And it doesn’t mean you don’t ever change, but that you gotta be pretty well-prepared.”
One way he handles it is that he has a specific rule that he spends the same amount of days to shoot a film’s third act as he did the first two acts combined, saying “I always give us more time to shoot that so that the movie gets bigger and bigger and bigger.”
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” is set to open in cinemas everywhere next Friday.
