Marvel was so happy with the initial designs. Chris Townsend, Marvel’s visual effects supervisor, presented some artwork they had done before before coming to us, and said, “This is the dragon, and this is the Dweller.” And honestly, we didn’t deviate too much from that initial artwork. It was one of the first things I saw when I came onto the movie. For the dragon, we got some really early artwork.
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Well, the story itself evolved throughout production, and so did the characters.
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What was the evolution like for the Great Protector and Dweller in Darkness? How did those elements evolve as far as their design and the way they move? There were lots of geeky moments along the way when people were talking about how things could play out with the rings. But it was fun to to explore all of that early on. … The rings were a big talking point throughout, obviously. I think that helps, because it’s a little easier to understand. There’s only so much visual information we want to throw at people, and in the end, we kind of stuck to a tighter color palette. That was cool visually, but we found that it was distracting from the story a bit too much. So when he was performing a specific move, we would get a specific color, and when they were flying around him, they would have an aurora effect, and you would get some some funky colors there, too. It initially ranged a little further out than that.
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We would have a wide color range for Shang-Chi that wasn’t just the warmer colors you see in the movie - the golds and oranges and red tones. We actually explored having color variations for each character. , each one had a particular purpose, and there was a point at which Kevin wanted to bring some of that into the movie as well. The original Ten Rings from the comics each had different colors, along with being finger rings instead of what we see in the movie. We did a little bit of exploratory work there as well. So dialing in that specific movement for each character, each stunt person had to really take a little bit of time to work through the movements, and the effects themselves that come off the rings were also very important. He uses them as whips and projectiles, or even what we called a buzz saw. Wenwu is very aggressive with them, and uses them as weapons predominantly.
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So we did a little bit of research and exploratory work with that, and we also wanted to make sure that they were hitting the emotional beats, so there was a little bit of a delay between Shang-Chi’s movements and the rings themselves.Īnd Wenwu used the rings in a very different way …Įxactly. He used them defensively, and they would fly around him in a way that was almost like he was pulling them through water. Whenever they’re being manipulated by Shang-Chi, for example, they had more of a flow to their movement. It’s metal, we’ve seen something like it before, and they’re non-deforming - but their movement was very, very character-specific. From a CG perspective, it’s not much of a challenge to get a realistic-looking ring. Yeah, the rings were a little more tricky, honestly, than I thought they would be. What went into creating them and getting them to the final look they had in the film? They’re such a unique visual element in the film, and not what many people expected as far as how they’re used and what they look like when they’re used. Sean Walker: I think it was about 305 shots, and we touched a few more than that overall. Shang-Chi is forced to reunite with his estranged sister, Xu Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), in order to stop his father from using the power of the Ten Rings to unleash the dragons on humanity.ĭigital Trends spoke to Weta Digital’s visual effects supervisor on the film, Sean Walker, to learn how the studio’s team helped bring the power of the rings, the dragons, and magical world they all inhabit to life on the screen in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.ĭigital Trends: How many shots did Weta’s team work on for the film? Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings broke new ground and plenty of box-office records, and like so many other films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it looked pretty spectacular while doing so.ĭirected by Destin Daniel Cretton, the film casts Simu Liu as the film’s titular martial arts superhero, who’s forced to confront both his destiny and his dark past when his father, Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), sets his sights - and the criminal empire he leads - on acquiring the magic of powerful dragons located in the hidden city of Ta Lo.