
THOR RAGNAROK CATE BLANCHETT MOVIE
Women made up just 32 percent of speaking characters in 2016 on movie screens, according to a recent study, and when women do show up, they are often thrown into one of a handful of narrative roles. In certain ways, her character is even repetitive and unoriginal, but this is not a criticism - it is progress. Hela (Cate Blanchett) is primarily there to send Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and company on an outrageously entertaining intergalactic road trip and forcibly fix Thor’s hammer dependency. Thor: Ragnarok is now playing in theaters.Thor: Ragnarok is not a villain-centric narrative. No wonder Morrison called the scene “absolutely cracked.” In the end, all their work comes back to the idea of plussing: “There’s no sacred cow, that’s for sure,” he says. artists: not only did they have to animate millions of hair strands, but each needed to look convincingly damp. and actually it was a revolving camera as she tracked through and killed everybody.” In the end, though, they completely re-edited the sequence because they found it more “percussive” broken up.Īnother challenge? The scene in which the wolf Fenris fights a hero in a waterfall, which was particularly difficult for the V.F.X. “We went a long way down the path with that. “At one point, it was one continuous shot. Her invasion of Asgard was a particularly tricky sequence that went through three fundamental reconstructions. wizardry that would come in post-production. The Oscar winner and her stunt double, Zoë Bell, were then filmed performing the majority of the sequences, and their movements influenced the C.G.I. “Does she spin? We know she’s got to throw out these blades one after another, so maybe it’s more like wushu-but instead of holding the knives, you’re throwing the knives.” These questions help form the basis for the character’s own unique “language” of movement, he says, which the stunt team can feed off of.įor this film, Marvel developed what Morrison calls “the smallest, active motion-capture markers that have been made yet.” Instead of wearing the standard gray motion-capture suit, the crew placed those markers all around Blanchett’s Hela costume. The biggest question they had to answer: how does Hela fight? “Is it more of a wushu style?” Morrison asked himself. “You start with that artwork, and then literally we start to do choreography with our stunt department,” Morrison says. This became a keyframe for Marvel, a benchmark of sorts the production team used as a guide for the rest of the sequence. The first image to be released from Ragnarok was concept art of Hela, antlers extended and standing with her back to the viewer as she prepares to unleash hell on the soldiers of Asgard. “Everybody is always going like, ‘How can we improve it? What’s a better version of this?’ So what that means is the sky’s the limit-especially when you have a character a magical component.” “There’s never a moment where everybody is standing there, patting themselves on the back, and going like, ‘Wow, we made something incredible!’” Morrison explains. But when it comes to a new character like Cate Blanchett’s Hela-the Goddess of Death, and the first female villain of this cinematic universe-the number of alternate designs literally climbs into the hundreds. “And any concept that you can better, you should.”ĭuring the plussing process, even a character like Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, who thundered about for four movies prior to Ragnarok, gets design adjustments. “The thinking behind it is there isn’t a right answer,” says Jake Morrison, a Marvel vet who’s supervised visual effects on all three Thor films.
THOR RAGNAROK CATE BLANCHETT SERIES
Long before the cameras started rolling on Thor: Ragnarok, the concept artists at Marvel Studios got together to do what they’ve always done: something Walt Disney called “plussing.” It’s basically a series of brainstorming sessions in which scores of possible designs are drawn up.
