In a recent tweet from Marvel Entertainment, they posted a video interview with Dan DeLeeuw, Marvel’s VFX supervisor that oversaw the work done on Avengers: Endgame. In a part of the video where they showed a rough cut of the final battle scene, you can see Sean Gunn’s character from Guardians of the Galaxy, Kraglin, in the front lines, ready to go to war. But we don’t see him in the final cut for the film. He was replaced by Rocket, who is actually motion captured by none other than Gunn himself! So he replaced himself, just as a different character.
Sean Gunn, brother of the director of the Guardians films, James Gunn, didn’t start out doing the motion capture, but was really just working as a stand-in for the actors who needed to hear Rocket’s lines spoken in the scenes. But he ended up being a much more integral part of the character for the animators. Here’s what he told ComicBook about the experience:
“In the first movie I wore the, you know, whatever you call it, but the nylon onesie,” Gunn said. “But then in the second movie and in the two Avengers movies, I just wore a gray sweatsuit, which was a lot more comfortable and I wear some knee pads and things like that. The thing that was unusual is that the motion capture part of it, which is technically motion reference, not motion capture because it’s not, they’re not doing it through a computer. The animators are literally watching what I do and animating that rather than sending it through an algorithm the way that you would do it with the way you would do it with a more humanoid character. That doesn’t work for a raccoon. It just doesn’t, the technology isn’t there. It doesn’t look good enough. So the animators actually watch what I do and animate that.
“But that part of that, we didn’t even know that that part was essential when we started it. The main reason that I was there was so that I could read the lines with the other actors and be an actor in the scene with them and I got down low because I knew for sightlines and things like that, that you’d want to be looking at a pair of eyes when you’re looking at the character’s eyes, so we did it like that really for the other actors. It wasn’t until we had been shooting for a week or two that the visual effects team said, ‘You know, these shots that we have of Sean in there are incredibly helpful to us as we start to animate Rocket and we start to know where he’s looking and where his hands are moving and what his, you know, what his shoulders are doing and that kind of thing.’ And so then we started making sure that we got at least one really strong reference shot with me in it for the animators, and then I would step out and do it through the subsequent takes from behind the camera and I’d be just doing my same vocal performance but feeding the actors the lines.”
That’s pretty awesome. And while it would have been cool to see Kraglin in the scene, it’s awesome to know that he is there, in a way. Check out the video below, and see Gunn in the shot starting at the 2:45 mark.
Avengers, assemble! See what went into creating the iconic final battle from Marvel Studios’ #AvengersEndgame: https://t.co/bRSCxYXvhK #EarthsMightiestShow pic.twitter.com/xFHYWIRtFX
— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) August 26, 2019