Black Panther VFX artist Todd Sheridan Perry admitted that the special effects of the film’s final battle between T’Challa and Killmonger were lacking, despite working on them himself.
In an interview with Inverse, Perry explained that VFX vendors often do not have enough time to complete the work assigned to them, causing VFX shots and effects to look janky and unrealistic. “It falls squarely on the shoulders of studios that set a release date and then work backward from there,” he said. “The time isn’t enough to live up to the ambition of the project.”
The consequences of the immense time crunch VFX studios are constantly under can be seen in the climatic fight between Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger in the vibranium mines under Wakanda, which critics and audiences almost universally deemed the worst part of the critically acclaimed film due to how unnatural it looks. Perry explained that the sequence looked rough because a late decision by Marvel Studios generated too much work to be finished by the predetermined deadline. However, he dismissed allegations that Method Studio, the company he had been working with at the time, only had six weeks to complete the final battle’s special effects.
“The Black Panther/Killmonger fight was always planned and had been through [previsualization], but the tribal battle up above didn’t feel big enough,” Perry recalled. “Marvel said they wanted it to be epic like there were hundreds of people fighting.”
Marvel had tasked Method Studio with rendering the VFX for both the vibranium mine fight and the battle on the Wakanda plains, but they all quickly realized that this was too much work for Method Studio to handle alone. Thus, the remaining workload for the mine fight was given to DNEG, another VFX vendor. This brought about its own set of problems, however, as sending over the completed CGI environments and character rigs was not just a simple copy-and-paste. Since the two studios used different software, DNEG had to extensively reprogram its system to use what Method Studio had shared.
“DNEG didn’t have the time to polish their shots as much as other companies who’d been working on the film for seven or eight months, and they were caught at a disadvantage,” Perry said. “I’m not saying DNEG is a bad company – they have a closet full of Oscars. They thankfully took it on and it actually got done. We wouldn’t have been able to accomplish it otherwise.”
Marvel Studios’ Black Panther is available to stream on Disney+. Production for sequel film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever recently wrapped, and is set to be released on Nov. 11.
Source: Inverse
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