The Helicarrier made an impressive debut in ‘The Avengers’. While standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier, Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner watch massive turbines unfurl from the ship’s side and begin to rotate. As the turbines gain momentum churning up the water below, the superstructure slowly begins to lift-off the ocean surface transforming into S.H.I.E.L.D.’s iconic Flying Fortress. Once airborne, Nick Fury activates the Helicarrier’s cloaking device making the ship undetectable from the ground.
Scanline VFX developed the effects for this sequence, including adding CG elements to the aircraft carrier’s deck, adding detail to ILM’s Helicarrier model for close-ups, and developing the incredible water effects involved in the carrier’s take-off.
Bryan Grill, who was Scanline’s visual effects supervisor on ‘The Avengers’, outlined the VFX process behind launching the Helicarrier.
Adding CG Elements to the Helicarrier’s Deck
Before the Helicarrier lifts-off, it looks exactly like any other aircraft carrier. Except the deck which Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner are standing on was actually an airfield in New Mexico. While a partial set was built, a lot of GC elements were added by Scanline.
“They blocked out the airfield with the set design of the top of an aircraft carrier,” Grill explained to FX Guide. “They had a couple of planes and bucks but the area of the tower was just a 40 x 40 set piece. It was only dressed 40 x 10. There were some shipping containers on top to fill out some of the top area, but we needed to fill out the shots with water, sky, jets and parts of the ship.”
Adding to ILM’s Helicarrier Model
Scanline took ILM’s model and added more detail and also created the bubbling water under the Helicarrier’s massive turbines. In addition, they created the water mist visible above these turbines.
There is a moment during the Helicarrier’s transformation where, just like Bruce Banner, the audience is wondering if the aircraft carrier will turn into a submarine. “There were a couple of shots where we were looking at the water and you couldn’t tell if it was getting ready to submerge,” continued Grill, “so we took a lot of care to make sure we didn’t give the gag up too early. Once you start seeing it lift out of the water and see the fans, you get what it’s going to be.”
To make this gag work, Grill said they added detail to ILM’s model and giving it a sense of scale so it looked like it was “three football fields long.” and put it through each of their cameras. “The biggest challenge in creating the introduction was always the scale of the Helicarrier,” Grill revealed to Flickering Myth. “Making sure it was always looking big and impressive. Starting with a model of the Helicarrier we got from ILM we were tasked to continue to build on the model to make it work for our group of shots. We kept increasing the amount of detail that we saw on the ship. The lighting and rendering of the Helicarrier was done in 3ds Max and rendered in Vray. It was very important that our CG Helicarrier was photorealistic even before we started with all the water simulations.”
The scale and realism of the model were also increased with the addition of motion captured people to the deck and animated moving vehicles to increase realism.
Flowline’s Impressive Water Effects
Scanline is an expert in creating the photo-realistic and natural behaving CG water effects with their proprietary software. Flowline.
While ILM’s Helicarrier CG model is the star of this sequence, the unsung hero is the CG water effects Scanline developed. Scanline is a leading expert in photorealistic, digital water effects with its proprietary, in-house fluid effects software, Flowline.
CG water has been a holy grail in visual effects since ‘Titanic’. With Flowline, Scanline has done a stellar job recreating the behavior of water for tsunamis and dam breaks in movies. While recreating natural phenomena like this is difficult there are plenty of real-world examples of tsunamis and dam breaks to draw from. The Helicarrier’s lift-off was an unprecedented challenge as there is no real-world aircraft carrier that can lift off the ocean and turn into a flying machine. Not yet, at least.
As a result, Scanline chose the closest real-world examples for inspiration. “We started with some concept images based on real-world hovercraft and aircraft such as helicopters and harrier jets [hovering] over the water,” Grill explained to Flickering Myth. “We studied the scale of white water wakes around real aircraft carriers for wave height and white water detail around such a big ship.”
It’s easy to follow Grill’s logic when watching the Helicarrier take-off. As the Helicarrier transforms it changes from aircraft carrier to a sort of hovercraft as the water bubbles underneath the giant turbines, and then finally it emulates a helicopter or harrier jet as it lifts off the ocean surface. Each of these crafts has a different effect on water, which at least as an approximation, fits the Helicarrier’s effect on the surrounding ocean.
With these visual references, Grill and his team used Flowline to create various water simulations from flat ocean to heavy bubbling under the turbines before the Helicarrier lifts-off, to dripping water as the craft takes-off. Grill told FX Guide that problems arose when developing the “bubbling water” around the massive turbines before lift-off. “With the bubbling, we noticed if it only occurred in the area that the actual real sim would happen, it would be much smaller than it ended up being. We enhanced the bubbling area to make it feel like the thing underneath it was really big.”
“The next step was the dripping water coming off the carrier; it needed to feel like it was falling off a very large and tall ship. The dripping water started off thicker from where it was cascading off and eventually had a misty quality by the time it hit the water surface below.”
Scanline then used compositing in Nuke to create a rainbow effect through the dripping water. “The rainbow look was based on opticals of where the sun was and integrating the sun flare.”
Cloaking the Helicarrier
Scanline also created the cloaking effect. Grill wanted a cloaking effect that was based in real science, rather than imitating cloaking devices on spaceships.
“We scoured the Internet to learn of the latest LED, plasma, and LCD technologies,” said Grill to Flickering Myth. “What we came up with was what if there was some sort of material on the bottom of the carrier that lit up like a big JumboTron you would see at any concert or sporting event; not just one JumboTron but hundreds of JumboTrons all being fed a video signal of the environment above the Helicarrier. Once the basic concept was in place it became the process of iterating different looks and timings until we came up with the look that filmmakers were happy with. This led to agreeing to do the other two cloaking shots in the movie and passing along our Nuke scripts to Weta so they could have the ability to tweak the parameters in their composites.”
As a result, the Helicarrier wasn’t totally invisible but had an outline almost like the Predator in stealth mode. Grill added, “It was all UV driven. We got the UVs of the carrier and the attached pieces and started creating different wipes and smaller subsets of transitions.”