The first Marvel Comics superhero team, the Fantastic Four, has had a rough road to cinematic adaptation, with two incarnations from the studio formerly known as 20th Century Fox that were met with mixed to negative reviews. Now, The Fantastic Four: First Steps arrives as an official entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a chance for on-screen redemption for a group of heroes that deserves a proper introduction.
Awards Buzz spoke with VFX supervisor Scott Stokdyk about returning to the world of Marvel following his work on the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man trilogy two decades ago (he won an Oscar for Spider-Man 2 in 2004). He discussed referencing previous concepts of the characters and what was most challenging about making it all look right:
“The biggest thing we studied was Reed, because stretching is incredibly hard to look realistic. We looked at some of the things they tried to do with muscles and some of the things they did with costumes and said, let’s take the best of what we did. Let’s go back to the comic book framing, let’s go to the Alex Ross comics. He did great things like breaking the frames with different parts, using perspective and depth which allowed you to get around some of the compositional challenges. So I feel like he was the one where we did the most deep dive into the other previous Fantastic Four movies. Though I will say too, Torch, he’s got this classic look, and we wanted to keep it grounded in real physics of course, which I’m sure they tried to do in the other movies, so we did a lot of fire reference and fire shooting, but it’s interesting because, fundamentally, it does have to be a human being under fire who’s emitting fire, so we couldn’t deviate too far from the previous movies. Torch probably was the one who had the most callback to previous movies.”
Watch the video above to hear about designing the Silver Surfer and Galactus, and working with Kevin Feige and the VFX teams from the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps is streaming on Disney+.
