Our Work on Black Widow
Long before joining the Avengers, when she was still a child, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) started her career as a Russian spy. In Black Widow, Natasha returns to her Red Room roots and faces characters from her past that she would rather soon forget.
Our artistry featured throughout the film, including a scene that showcases an epic mountain range, along with an enormous avalanche, as well the animation of an iconic Russian MI-8 helicopter.
The avalanche scene takes place somewhere in Russia, but the environment is modelled on a real mountain range in Svalbard, Norway. Using photography and photogrammetry from Marvel Studios as their guide, our artists used technology based on what we used for the avalanche in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. VFX Supervisor Sean Walker said the amount of detail they were able to produce “was pretty extreme”.
“There were a number of different techniques that we combined to make it work. We started in Houdini and did some blocking with that, then used that as the base for what we simulated in Synapse to add all of the details on top. It’s just layer upon layer, then another Synapse simulation that drove another layer of fine details on top.” says Walker.
“With the rendering side of things, we always had to make sure that it didn’t look like smoke, as that’s the biggest worry or risk when you’re working with huge volumes – it just ends up looking like smoke (rather than snow), so we had to just punch as much light scattering into it as we could”.
To maintain the realism of the helicopter, our artists did extensive research in flight simulators to understand exactly how this bulky but maneuverable machine should perform. This included a simulated “flight” over the Wellington suburb of Miramar, where Weta Digital is based, to obtain flight data as a base for the movements.
We also worked on some of the film’s smallest, cutest stars, the pigs from Melina’s (Rachel Weiss) farm. The “stunt pigs” were New Zealand kunekunes that quite liked being filmed for the artist reference content because there was snacks.