Before later movies characterized by their muddy CGI and digital collage of actors, the Marvel Cinematic Universe actually pulled off some cool filmmaking tricks with the help of special effects. Case in point: the puny, pre-serum version of Steve Rogers fans of the then-new series saw in 2011’s “Captain America: The First Avenger.” According to The Wrap, the movie achieved Steve’s original look via a combination of strategies, and scenes set before his transformation into the Cap we know were actually shot three times.
In one version of the scene, Chris Evans would stand in place and deliver his lines. In another, a scrawnier stand-in — “Atonement” and “Merlin” actor Leander Deeny — would perform in his place. In a third variation, the scene was reportedly filmed without any actor. This gave the effects team tons of footage to work their magic on. While productions typically shoot out of order, The Wrap notes that Evans typically shot the scenes first, allowing Deeny to step in and follow his lead for the second round of filming.
“Leander is the unsung hero of this,” visual effects supervisor Edson Williams told TheWrap. “He was very dedicated and he was very aware of mimicking Chris’ timing. He wasn’t trying to get his performance out there. It’s his biggest credit and it’s a role where you never see his face.” In a behind-the-scenes featurette shared by JoBlo, the crew dug into the granular details of the process, explaining that they would sometimes also employ green screen and tracking markers and that they had to digitally slim down Deeny, too. It also took as many as nine different effects companies to make puny Steve a reality, according to the featurette, though Lola Visual Effects did much of the work we see on screen.
Skinny Steve Rogers was made up of Chris Evans, a body double, and plenty of visual effects
Director Joe Johnston, editor Jeffrey Ford, and cinematographer Shelly Johnson also revealed more from their bag of tricks in the film’s official DVD commentary. Johnston said that the scene introducing the version of Cap he calls “Skinny Steve” was actually among the final scenes completed for the film. “Shooting him as Skinny Steve was really complicated because we had to adjust everything around him in addition to adjusting him,” he explained. “We knew we had to shrink him down so we had to take account of that for everything, the environment he was in.”
As the film’s director of photography, Johnson, noted, Lola Visual Effects “specializes in ‘cosmetic enhancement,'” which up until this point probably didn’t typically involve drastically changing the size of an entire person. “This is probably one of the most extreme cosmetic enhancements they ever had to do I would think,” Johnson said. According to the Lola website, the company first worked with Marvel on 2008’s “Iron Man,” and continued collaborating with the studio after “The First Avenger.” Their other MCU claims to fame include digitally de-aging Robert Downey Jr. for “Captain America: Civil War,” aging Hayley Atwell for “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and work on “Doctor Strange,” “Ant-Man,” “The Avengers,” and more.Fans tuning in to the “First Avenger” digital commentary today will get the sense that this was an extremely detail-oriented process, one that contrasts pretty obviously with more recent assertions that Marvel hasn’t been taking enough care with its CGI work — or its visual effects teams. In 2011, without dozens of movies in the pipeline and more to come, “The First Avenger” crew was able to focus only on one movie, and it shows. “It really looks amazing, it’s hard to believe what they did,” Ford says at one point, noting that the team had to take into account not just Evans’ visuals but the look of the people around him in each shot. “You’d have to select the performances of the people around him, because it couldn’t be part of the same one,” he explained. “So you had to find ways to match them.”
While Deeny deserves ample praise for his performance as “Skinny Steve,” Ford also says the final product works so well because much of Evans’ performance is intact. “So much of the movement is Chris’s movement,” he explains on the commentary track. “It’s not another actor, it’s not a body double situation for the most part, it’s Chris. So his head and his body are in sync with his performance.” Of course, that took some work, too. As Williams told The Wrap, there were times in which matching Evans’ head to Deeny’s neck — or the neck of a digitally slimmed-down version of the double — was difficult. “The head replacements were tricky, because you were taking the head of a rhinoceros and putting it on the body of a gazelle,” he told The Wrap at the time. Somehow, everything worked, and “The First Avenger” remains an impressively beloved early entry in the biggest film franchise on earth.
