With filming under way in New Mexico on Marvel’s team up flick The Avengers, the concept art depicting the characters has made it’s début. Offering a better look at Jeremy Renner as the character Hawkeye, as well as Captain America sporting a more contemporary outfit, the artwork reveals how actor Mark Ruffalo will look when he transforms into The Hulk.
Both big screen outings have failed to ignite interest in the character, and in attempt to salvage what’s left of the green guy’s popularity, ABC hopes to launch a new TV series helmed by film-maker Guillermo del Toro, which will combine puppetry, animatronics and CGI. For the big screen, ‘The Avengers’ will adopt cutting edge motion capture to bring the misunderstood guy to life, and this time Marvel thinks they’ll get it right.
Released at Comic-Con International, fans got a sense of the character’s new look thanks to the promotional poster that shows both the angry giant and Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner in a pensive silhouette.
Speaking with Hero Complex, Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios and producer of ‘The Avengers’ was asked about this new visualization:
The image we released on the last day of Comic-Con — which got a tremendous amount of attention and I was very pleased about — is a very good representation of what he’s going to look like. He’ll be about the same size he was in “The Incredible Hulk” or maybe a little bit smaller…The most important thing is that face. As you can already see in that concept painting, it is — more than any Hulk that’s ever been done in live action — a Hulk that let’s you see the actor in there. You will be able to see Ruffalo in there. That was a big revelation for us.
With the new design resembling Ruffalo, he’ll also be playing the Hulk using performance capture to make the characters seamless:
But we’ve taken a different approach because Hulk is Banner and, frankly, we came to question our approach. Why are we not doing it this way? So we did a few designs that put Ruffalo into it, and we immediately saw how much more you feel for the creature. When you keep that connection going between Banner and the Hulk and you have characters around him trying to reach Banner inside — “Bruce, calm down,” and all of that classic Hulk stuff — it means more if you see the same actor throughout. I think before it was something we thought might look silly. We were nervous about getting it good enough [via visual effects] to work. Frankly, it was the same way we were nervous early on about making Steve Rogers skinny for “Captain America.” Is this going to look disturbing? Is this going to look silly? In the end, we got that one right. We’re going to get this one right.
It’s possible to see some of Ruffalo’s features in the concept art and today’s CGI should be convincing, hopefully the performance capture will allow audiences to connect with this classic character.
The film stars Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Mark Ruffalo, Cobie Smulders, Scarlett Johansson, Clark Gregg, and Samuel L. Jackson.
Joss Whedon’s The Avengers opens in 3D on May 4, 2012.
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