The visual effects company Digital Domain has shared an exclusive clip with Digital Trends showcasing the work that went into making one of the most pivotal scenes in Captain America: Brave New World. At over eight minutes long, the scene shows Captain America (Anthony Mackie) and the Falcon (Danny Ramirez) intercepting a dogfight over the Pacific Ocean between US and Japanese forces that could lead to a full-blown war.
But what really makes the scene unique is that it’s almost entirely CGI. “There was a lot of footage where they captured Anthony Mackie on all these wires. But by the time it was over, it was all CG,” previsualization supervisor Cameron Ward told Digital Trends.
In the previsualization (previs) clip, we get a good glimpse at the early-stage CGI they used to build the scene completely from scratch, including the massive open-ocean setting. Ward said the biggest challenge in the scene wasn’t creating such a large space. It was the speed at which all the characters and objects were traveling.
“The biggest challenge with this scene was the speed at which everything was moving,” Ward said. “We had 600-mile-per-hour missiles flying through the air above an open ocean that we had to build from scratch. You have to set up your camera in a way that feels like Cap just flew by at 600 miles an hour chasing after them. So we had to ask ourselves, how do we visualize that?”
Creating the clouds was also a surprisingly hefty task for the team. Digital Domain created its own proprietary cloud shader tool to help produce the right sizes, shading, textures, shadows, and various levels of opacity that we see in real clouds. The team even layered four to six cloud renderings on top of each other to give each cloud a varying level of brightness and depth, as we see in real clouds.
Light and shadow were another huge focus for Digital Domain. Taking place over a reflective surface like water meant the team needed to accurately recreate the way sunlight reflects on the ocean. They also needed to create shadows to help give the scene a photorealistic look, so the team made sure to pay attention to every frame that involved a jet or character soaring through the air so they could create a shadow that would be cast on the ocean below.
Before Captain America, Ward had worked on tons of huge projects, like The Last of Us, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Thunderbolts*. But he says Brave New World was his biggest venture yet and said that Digital Domain worked on the movie for an entire year. “I’ve been with DD for five years,” he said, “and this is the biggest, longest sequence I’ve ever worked on. It actually became much more CG than intended as the project went on, after they realized some of the plates didn’t work because of things like reflections in the shot.”
Now you can watch Captain America: Brave New World at home. The Marvel film arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on May 13. Buy at Disney+ subscribers can stream the film on the service starting May 28.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.