Marvel Studios thrives on the CGI used in its various projects, with many of its heroes and characters being created entirely by using visual effects. Moon Knight is one such example, and in a new featurette, Marvel Studios' visual effects supervisor Sean Faden breaks down how the scenes featuring Khonshu were filmed, and how his epic fight scene with Ammit was created.
The four-minute Moon Knight featurette released by Marvel Studios offers a behind-the-scenes look at some of the segments that featured F. Murray Abraham's Khonshu. Turns out that Abraham is only the voice actor, and Karim El Hakim was the actor filming the Khonshu scenes on set. It is interesting to see the actor dressed up as the Egyptian god and walk around with a large eyeline pole strapped to his back.
Before a scene is filmed, the visual effects team uses pre-vis, a method that involves creating a mockup animation, which gives “the team a sense of what the final shot might look like.” With Moon Knight, most of the fight scenes were created in this manner. For instance, the fight between Mr. Knight and the invisible jackal had Oscar Isaac and May Calamawy acting with a stunt person dressed in a gray suit. “I think if you end up using too much CG in every shot, you end up losing some of the reality,” Faden said. But, the Khonshu and Ammit fight scene required a lot more work.
The battle between the gods is one of the most epic moments in the series finale. Faden explains that the scene required “a lot of pre-vis, some storyboarding, and a lot of back and forth with our stunt team trying to figure out what the best stunt choreography would be for these moments.” Stunt people dressed up in costumes similar to those that the characters wear on-screen participated in the filming of the Moon Knight scene inside the god chamber. This is when the characters are “normal size,” prior to when they become giants and fight around the pyramids in Cairo.
A digital model of the scene was created from archive footage of Cairo and the pyramids. The scene was filmed using prop heads attached to long poles, which looked like the Egyptian goddess Ammit and Khonshu. Stunt people held the poles and moved them around to capture the movement of the characters in the scene, and the lighting was adjusted in post-production to make the prop heads appear much larger than they actually were. It is fascinating for fans to be able to see the effort put in behind the scenes to bring a Marvel Studios series to life.
Moon Knight is streaming on Disney Plus.
Source: Marvel Entertainment/YouTube