The VFX team on Falcon and the Winter Soldier explained how Captain America’s new wings differ from the previous versions. Imageworks are the people behind the impressive flight sequences near the end of the series. They talked to Before and Afters about the magic behind making fans believe Sam Wilson’s new abilities. Anthony Mackie has been incredibly complimentary to everyone who made the process easier on him. Staggering visual effects from Chris Waegner and his team make all the difference in the world. A lot of that initial direction comes from Marvel Studios HQ, but it is up to individual teams to make the product sing on-screen. Check out what Imageworks had to say about their process down below:
Waegner began, “One of the assets that gets revealed in episode six is the new suit and the new wings. Obviously, that needed to be a full digital build as well. And we ended up incorporating a lot of that. It’s a new suit, he’s learning how to use it. We had a lot of fun animating that new suit and him learning how to use it.”
“If you look at the previous incarnations of Falcon’s wings, they tend to have more of a military-type style design to them, lots of carbon fibre, lots of hinges that are exposed, things like that. And this new wing design, because it’s a new suit, he’s becoming Captain Falcon, this is a much more state-of-the-art, carbon fibre weave,” he continued. “It’s not necessarily scratched up, abused carbon fibre. It’s a cleaner brand new suit. And that was something the filmmakers really wanted us to pay attention to. So there’s a lot of iterations in design that stemmed or began with some artwork supplied by Marvel.”
Mackie actually was scared that Marvel wouldn’t be able to pull this off. He talked about that on the red carpet at the MTV Awards.
“I was very skeptical and very surprised about the idea of a TV series, I didn’t think we wouldn’t be able to translate to television what we do on film,” Mackie explained. “I was blown away and surprised by how well they were able to keep the amazing scope of the films in the Marvel Industry and take it to Disney+.”
Did you love the new wingsuit? Let us know in the comments!