As the production designer on the Marvel One-Shot shorts Item 47, Agent Carter and All Hail The King, Shepherd Frankel – a veteran of such films as Magnolia, Step Up and 27 Dresses – helped build little additions onto the worlds of The Avengers, Captain America and Iron Man 3.
With Ant-Man, he got the chance to design a Marvel project for the big screen – though of course he’s primarily working with a hero who’s really, really small. With the movie arriving on digital and on disc, we had a quick chat about how Frankel created the macro world.
Was working on Ant-Man simply a matter of scaling up, or a radically different experience from the Marvel shorts?
The One-Shots were a very specific kind of thing – these 15- to 20-minute spinoff stories that were like little treats on the DVD for fans, It allowed Marvel to develop and reintegrate certain storylines and fantasy ideas. I would say the Agent Carter one [included on the Iron Man 3 Blu-ray release] was the most satisfying – it was truly a period short, and I thought we elevated the level of that and executed it great.
So the shorts just naturally led to Ant-Man?
They’ve always wanted me to be a participant in their films, and it was just a matter of doing the right one. I’ve done additional photography, I’ve done huge-scale sets and environments, so it wasn’t really about scale or anything like that. Ant-Man was the absolute perfect first Marvel film for me to design, because it speaks to things that I really connect to … I love the visual symphony of going from small and textured to big and outrageous. And the big, outrageous physical events – these big laboratories and high-concept ideas – were rooted in a machine-tactile kind of thing they weren’t overtly fantasies.
But there’s certainly a fantastic element to most of the action, which plays out at teeny-tiny size.
Thor has the Seven Realms of Asgard Guardians Of The Galaxy has interplanetary travel, Ant-Man’s different universes are going into the macro world, and experiencing it from a way that you and I would if we were shrunk down. That’s something that we can relate to, but which we’ve never seen. It’s, like, insanely fascinating.
So how did you create that landscape? Was it practical or digital?
Those environments were real environments. We built them. Basically 80% of those macro environments were just built as normal-size environments that we were able to capture with Frazier lenses and Skater scopes. The technology of cameras today allowed us to capture these environments as digital assets, and then we would have our actors and stunt guys running through a motion-capture environment that did not have scenery, but had parameters based on the actual sets. We never built oversized anything we literally captured that environment in the digital world.
Have digital effects become a standard part of the production designer’s resources now? Is CGI just another tool in the box?
It’s another drawing tool. It’s a tool that I use to do my job when appropriate. And on a film like Ant-Man, it’s totally appropriate to be thinking “Okay, we’ll do this one digitally we’ll do that one this way we want to capture that [other thing] in camera and then expand it digitally.” It’s about knowing how to utilize [effects] as a tool, and working closely with our effects team and our director and producers on how to strategize the film. And that takes a lot of smart people – and I’m just kind of smart, and part of that team. [laughter] I don’t govern that team, but I’m part of the strategists around there. And it’s ultimately to serve the film, and have the audience feel like this isn’t a visual-effects film. If they’re thinking about it, that means it’s not working.
Marvel’s Ant-Man is available now on iTunes and Google Play, and arrives on Blu-ray and DVD December 8.
See our Ant-Man review here.
