How “Captain America” Transformed Evans

If you’ve seen the trailers for Captain America: The First Avenger, you’ll notice that before he’s injected with super soldier serum, Steve Rogers is a bit on the scrawny side.  So how did the effects team achieve the look for Rogers pre-serum?

Visual effects supervisor Christopher Townsend tells Hitfix’s Dan Feinberg that actor Chris Evans was given “digital plastic surgery,” to help ensure that  they “capture the essence of Chris Evans’ performance” in every frame.

“The technique involved shrinking Chris in all dimensions,” director Joe Johnson tells Film Journal. “We shot each skinny Steve scene at least four times; once like a normal scene with Chris and his fellow actors in the scene, once with Chris alone in front of a green screen so his element could be reduced digitally, again with everyone in the scene but with Chris absent so that the shrunken Steve could be re-inserted into the scene, and finally with a body double mimicking Chris’s actions in case the second technique were required.”

“When Chris had to interact with other characters in the scene, we had to either lower Chris or raise the other actors on apple boxes or elevated walkways to make skinny Steve shorter in comparison,” adds Johnson. “For close-ups, Chris’ fellow actors had to look at marks on his chin that represented where his eyes would be after the shrinking process, and Chris had to look at marks on the tops of the actor’s head to represent their eyes. These marks then had to be digitally removed in post-production.”

And while the film is set mostly in World War II, Marvel Studios Kevin Feige confirms there will be bookends in the present.

And he says that the film will have an “earnest” tone as we’ve seen in the trailers.

“But I wouldn’t say it’s overly earnest. On the flip side, I wouldn’t say it’s overly jokey just because we wanna get some zingers in. It doesn’t play like that. Much of the humor from the first half comes from how out-of-place Steve is,” says Feige. “There’s a whole sequence between when he’s selected for the program and when he goes into Brooklyn for the procedure and he’s not quite as agile as the other candidates. There’s some humorous moments in that. But this not the Chris Evans being Mr. One-Liner. The script that these guys have written for the past two years, it has humorous moments, has fun where appropriate. A lot of that comes from Bucky and a lot of the Commandos.”