A unique scene in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has Ego (Kurt Russell) explaining to the Guardians his history of universe travel and his many lovers. This is told in a sequence featuring visual effects by Animal Logic, which created 3D picture dioramas with characters inside resembling almost porcelhine-like statues.
Academy Award nominee Christopher Townsend was the overall visual effects supervisor for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. The other Oscar nominees for visual effects for that film are Guy Williams, Jonathan Fawkner and Dan Sudick. Here Townsend outlines the creative process behind the dioramas, including the false start in their design.
There were a huge amount of challenges with the dioramas; how do you sell that? How do you tell a story and use imagery? Initially, we’d been through this idea of sand sculptures and Renaissance art, and animated paintings.
James Gunn had referenced the a-ha ‘Take On Me’ video, which has that illustrative, 1980s feel. We wanted that in the fractal-filled palace that Animal Logic had built as a CG asset. We went went down that route and they worked on a bunch of illustrative looks, and James loved it, and we post-vis’d it and then there was the first test screening.
One of the comments in the test screening was, ‘During the PowerPoint presentation bit…’ And we were like, ‘Okay. That doesn’t work.’ It was two dimensions, and we needed something three dimensional.
It was a real struggle trying to come up with something, and James said, ‘I want something crazy. I want Jeff Koons meets Hummel sculptures. I want it to be catchy, and weird, but massive, oversized. It’s gonna be really fun.’
Then Kevin Feige brought up the fact that Ego had travelled across the universe in this beautiful white ship, and it has these incredibly interesting minimalist shapes.
So I said, ‘How about we put these weird crazy diorama-esque things, and these Hummel and Koons statues inside the eggs?’ And so that’s what Animal Logic did, we went down that alleyway, and it’s pretty weird, and crazy.
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