One of the reasons I love movies is going on that journey the hero's going on
and trying to create the visual for that character
that's going to, sort of, lock in the audience's empathy
and take them forward through the journey of a film,
is something that I, you know, I'm always going to pick the heroes.
Marvel superheroes are powerful, not only because they literally have powers,
but also because they have lots of flaws.
Spider-Man and Peter Parker are relatable because he has real-world problems.
He, you know, has problems with girlfriends.
He has problems with his Aunt May. He has problems in school.
I pitched the idea of having Spider-Man's eyes be emotive.
That they would move and essentially be able to understand
what Peter is thinking under the suit through his eyes.
And that was one of the things that I'm most proud about,
having solved here at Marvel.
That's one of the best parts of working on this job too
is just working from those great icons.
I was trying to think of different ways for Thanos to attack Doctor Strange.
so I was thinking, maybe he could, like, destroy planets or...
A lot of us that work here in the Visual Development department are fans.
And just make it come through, like, portals or comets or whatever,
just raining down on Doctor Strange.
[Meinerding] A lot of what the characters are about is sort of ingrained in us.
Being passionate about finding new ways of representing them
-in a storytelling context... -I think they're really great.
...just keeps driving me forward.
If I could talk to the 13-year-old version of myself
and tell him what I'm working on today, I don't think that he would believe me.
Having worked on a character like Captain America or Iron Man...
um, people love them.
And if you do justice by that character,
people will continue to love them, and I'm excited by that.
I loved these characters from when I was very young.
I started buying comics probably when I was 10 or 11.
Um, and then all through the '90s, I was reading comics when I was a teenager.
So, I started pretty, pretty young with the characters
and I've, sort of, been fortunate enough to end up with a job
that really allows me to play into my fanboy tendencies.
It used to be that a person like me would be doing pencil drawings
that would need to be approved before something got made.
[Stegon] The final pose that we're interested in,
some of the initial pose wasn't dy-- quite dynamic enough. He feels too stiff.
Maybe he doesn't feel menacing enough because he's a very powerful character,
so he needs to feel powerful.
[Meinerding] It's using computers and being able to get high resolution,
more finished images.
We're able to actually accomplish something
that's as close to the finished thing as possible.
All together, it probably took about 30 or 40 versions.
And the main purpose of that was to, essentially,
put it into a 3-D maquette, that was gonna be 3-D printed,
as a final sign-off for the directors and the producers
to see the character, and you know, be able to walk around it.
We're working on around three films a year and adding more projects to that as we go.
Finding ways of accomplishing that,
both from an artistic standpoint of actually solving problems,
design problems artistically,
also working with my team to art direct and help them solve problems as well.
And working with visual effects and the costume departments
to really take our designs and help them get resolved in a really amazing way
is enough to keep me busy through the whole week
and into the weekends and-- [chuckles]
As an artist, there's also just a sense of wanting to do better than the last time.
Every artist wants to keep growing.
We're always having new chances to reinterpret the characters.
We're having new places for them to go
with the stories the filmmakers are coming up with.
And we're really getting the chance to push ourselves.
This is the Captain America hero costume from Captain America: The First Avenger.
It's, sort of, his culmination in that film
for blending, being a symbol and being a soldier.
It was also the first time I was trying to incorporate the stripes as straps,
turning them in, pulling them off of it, just being on the costume,
and turning them into something that was part of the utility of the costume.
So to transition from the World War II aesthetic to the end of Cap's journey,
so he's already had, I don't know, probably six costumes in between this
and The First Avenger costume and this one.
One of the challenges we had on this suit was really making these scales work.
A lot of my job is hopefully inspiring people,
but it's also just letting people solve problems.
We did a whole bunch of iterations where it would look perfectly fine in the front.
But the moment that, you know, you would go into a three-quarter view,
those lines started to diminish and not look as great.
One of the things as an artist is failure comes as a fear with every brushstroke.
-Yeah, straight lines on a compound curve. -Yep.
[both laugh]
You're starting from a blank page and you're building it up.
And a lot of times, you'll take a misstep. You'll go the wrong direction...
[Smith] There's, like, an odd banding shape. Um...
[Meinerding] ...and have to course correct.
So, I sort of deal with failure at every moment, I feel, of every day. [chuckles]
When you see it on-screen you just say, "Oh, cool, he's wearing the scales."
But the amount of engineering and artistry that goes into making these things
really come to fruition is incredible.
I had hoped it would look very good,
and it turned out better than I could have ever expected.
Every part of this ride has felt like,
it can't get bigger, it can't get more amazing.
And somehow the filmmakers and Marvel Studios make it all come together
into something that's even bigger than what came before.
The characters hold a lot of nostalgia
because I loved them from when I was younger.
And now that, like, I've been working at Marvel for a little beyond 13 years,
and those memories are, you know,
are things I'll cherish for the rest of my life.