‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ Featurette Shows How Marvel De-Aged Michelle Pfeiffer and Created More VFX

Ant-Man and the Wasp is now available on Blu-ray, but a new featurette about the film breaks down several of the movie’s impressive visual effects, including how VFX artists de-aged Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer for flashback scenes. Watch the featurette below!

Ant-Man and the Wasp Featurette

In the above video, Danielle Costa, Vice President of Visual Effects at Marvel Studios, walks you through several of Ant-Man and the Wasp‘s big special effects. The Ant-Man sequel is effects-heavy, from the VFX used to make Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly look tiny (or huge), to the way antagonist Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) appears to move through walls and disappear.

Costa first discusses why the look of the Wasp’s costume changed from the brief moment we saw it in the first Ant-Man to what we see in the sequel. There was more of a “dragonfly” look to the costume in Ant-Man, while here, the look is “more techy.” Costa says this was because they were looking for a costume that looked as if it could’ve been “created” and “less organic.”

The biggest challenge for Ant-Man and the Wasp was blending live-action and CG to make everything look as if it’s in the same universe. “You have to be able to convincingly intigrate live-action photography with CG elements artfully, in a way that people will believe it’s all in the same lighting condition.”

Marvel movies have de-aged several actors for flashback scenes already, and they’re about to do it again with Samuel L. Jackson in Captain Marvel. I tend to find this slightly creepy – no matter how good it looks, there’s always something a little off. Still, it’s impressive. In this featurette, we see a breakdown of how Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer were de-aged for a scene near the beginning of the film. Costa calls the process “young-ifying” here, saying “We dot up the actor’s facing for points of reference for tracking, then re-sculpt and re-shape the face to make them seem younger.” Cool, or creepy? You decide!

As the video continues, Costa talks about the effects used on Ghost, how the movie’s giant ants were created, the work that goes into fight sequences, and of course, how Giant Man was created. For that scene, in which Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang is trudging through the San Francisco Bay, Costa talks about how much work went into making the digital water look murky to reflect the real waters of the bay. In short: making movies like this isn’t easy, folks.

In “Ant-Man and The Wasp,” Scott Lang is grappling with the consequences of his choices, as both the Super Hero Ant-Man and a father, in the aftermath of “Captain America: Civil War.” As he struggles to rebalance his home life with his responsibilities as Ant-Man, he’s confronted by Hope van Dyne and Dr. Hank Pym with an urgent new mission to rescue Janet van Dyne from the Quantum Realm. Scott must once again put on the suit and learn to fight alongside The Wasp, all while attempting to serve house arrest, assist fast talking-Luis (Michael Peña) and the X-con Security crew, and thwart the efforts of a new adversary called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and her ally Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne).

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