"Black Widow" ALL VFX REMOVED! VFX Breakdown

Black Widow has received good reviews for "tweaking" the Marvel Comic Universe formula and being just different enough to be interesting...


Scanline VFX, Mammal Studios, SSVFX, Trixter, Cinesite, Digital Domain, Weta Digital, and ILM all joined forces to (despite Covid delays, lawsuits, and bonus controversies) make Black Widow another Marvel Universe Box office hit.

Weta Digital.
Weta's work was mainly The Gulag Escape, Melina's House, The Helicopter Crash, and the Pigs. The Director gave them a huge "mood" book full of photos, descriptions, and textures to give them a feel for the look she was going for.
The Gulag was created starting with Lidar Scans and Photogrammetry captured on set and real environment plates shot in Norway.

For the Avalanche scene, they researched footage of real avalanches and then identified and broke down the things that make an avalanche into multiple parts. First was a base layer in Houdini, a broader simulation with tendrils of ejected snow, next was a highly detailed volumetric element layered on top using Synapse and then a finer detail layer on top of that, once again using Synapse, when it came to rendering they had to avoid it looking like just smoke, they did this by putting as much light scattering into it as they could, and because snow is highly reflective they also added a prismatic shading effect that gave the particulate a slight hint of color just like when the light catches a snowflake just right.

Weta also had to do some pretty strange CG work at Melina's house, even though they used 4 real pigs on set they still had to make a CG pig. The trained pigs could sit down and flop over but they were still too twitchy and their breathing too erratic to sell the scene so Weta made a CG Digi-Double or CG Piggy-Double in order to make the scene believable, in addition to this, the real pig wouldn't eat pickles but really enjoyed McDonald's french fries so Weta ended up substituting a french fry for a CG pickle in post.

Digital Domain.
Digital domains work was mainly focused on the creation and the destruction of "The Red Room".
Working closely with Marvel artists and referencing the director's "mood book" the flying red room and the entire environment around it were created digitally.

The aesthetic that Marvel was looking for was practical and industrial with hints of Soviet-era brutalist architecture.
Digital Domain knew from the start that they didn't just have to build The Red Room, but they had to destroy it too, this meant that as they built it they also had to roughly choreograph how it would be destroyed so that they knew exactly where they needed to have closed destructible geometry.

Cinesite.
Cinesite had to produce a rather disturbing VFX shot for when Alexei breaks an inmates arm in an arm-wrestling match, they created a CG hand and forearm and did a 2D re-projection to blend out of the live-action into the CG limb, because the actors were so close to each other, there is a light interaction between them and so it was necessary to roto-animate Alexei to realistically cast shadows.

Scanline VFX.
The majority of Scanline's work was focused on the Bridge Fight Sequence between the Taskmaster and Black Widow.
The live-action plates were filmed in London and the environment they wanted to use was also in the UK, but the bridge they wanted to use was actually in Norway so they made a half replica of the bridge and filmed in front of bluescreens.

Scanline then had to create the second half of the bridge, the water below the bridge, and 10 kilometers of 3D environment with different mountains and enough variations of trees and plant life to make it look real, even though after color correction a lot of it is too dark to notice.

Another thing you may not have noticed was that for principal photography Natasha's car was positioned front first hanging off the bridge, this was so they could get the shot of her hanging over the water and then exiting the rear window, however, when her car initially gets hit on the road it's facing the other way so when it's rolling over its actually facing the other way, with its rear end facing the side of the bridge.

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