The Business
AWARDS SEASON
2019THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 50 NOVEMBER 13, 2019
G
oose, the feisty feline companion in
Captain Marvel, is no ordinary cat. For
one, Goose is actually an alien creature
called a Flerken, which can emit tentacles
from its mouth. And secondly, Goose is com-
puter generated.
Disney and Marvel’s Captain Marvel, the
first female-fronted stand-alone movie in
the MCU, with Brie Larson as the titular lead,
takes place in the 1990s and explores the
origin story of the comic book superhero. For
the filmmakers, Goose needed
to “perform” beyond the scope of
what is teachable to a real cat.
And then there was the issue
of Larson’s allergy to cats. This
meant that the VFX team had
to create a fully CG feline. The
character “has full muscle, fur and skin ani-
mation,” explains Janelle Croshaw Ralla, one
of the film’s VFX supervisors.
Scenes included Goose in zero gravity while
traveling on a space craft, swallowing the
Tesseract and fending off enemies with its
giant tentacles.
Goose was modeled on a real feline named
Reggie, who also appears in certain scenes.
During filming, Reggie was supported by
three stand-in cats that would take over when
he needed a rest. But it was Reggie that the
VFX team cloned in CG to create Goose.
Reggie first had to be lidar scanned, which
provided a guide, Croshaw Ralla explains. A
model cat was built without fur and a skeleton
was added. Strands of fur were meticulously
placed, and animators created movement suchCrafting a Scene-Stealing Cat
Captain Marvel VFX supervisor Janelle Croshaw Ralla shows off the CGI wizardry
that helped the frisky Goose deliver an out-of-this-world performanceas walking and jumping. “A big challenge was
to match the incredibly complex fur patterns
on Reggie,” Croshaw Ralla says.
The work on Goose was part of the whop-
ping 2,400 visual effects shots in Captain
Marvel, shared by 15 VFX houses including
Industrial Light + Magic, Trixter and Animal
Logic. These included action sequences and
the de-aging of Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury
to make him 25 years younger.
The work on Jackson — comprising roughly
550 VFX shots — was shared by three VFX
studios, with the most shots handled by Lola
VFX. “Nick Fury was our first feature de-aging
a major character,” says Lola VFX supervi-
sor Trent Claus. The Lola process involves
2D digital compositing onto the actual face,
resulting in a sort of hybrid of live-action and
digital effects. Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson
also benefited from de-aging magic.
Meanwhile, Croshaw Ralla says that the film
has 70 VFX shots of CG Goose that had to be
blended with scenes of the real Reggie.
Other VFX highlights in Captain Marvel
include the kinetic metro train action
sequence, inspired by the classic L-train chase
in The French Connection. This involved film-
ing live-action environments and layering in
a CG train before adding a complicated fight
scene that takes place on the train’s roof.
And then there’s the work needed for
Captain Marvel herself, for the moment when
her full power is unleased. Says Croshaw
Ralla, “The idea was to make it feel like the
power is coming from within her, and not that
she’s on fire.”BEHIND THE SCREEN | CAROLY N GIARDINA
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