Fans of Marvel Cinematic Super Hero, Captain America, played by Chris Evans might have sometime wondered how he was made so small and skinny in the first few scenes of the movie, Captain America -- Winter Soldier.
In a film journal interview, Director of the movie, Joe Johnston gave insights to how this was achieved.

FJI: The glimpses of the skinny, pre-super-serum Steve Rogers we see in the movie’s trailer are quite striking, particularly given how buff Chris Evans is as Captain America. How did you achieve that particular effect?

Joe Johnston: We used two major techniques. Most of the shots were done by an L.A. company called LOLA that specializes in digital "plastic surgery." The technique involved shrinking Chris in all dimensions. We shot each skinny Steve scene at least four times; once like a normal scene with Chris and his fellow actors in the scene, once with Chris alone in front of a green screen so his element could be reduced digitally, again with everyone in the scene but with Chris absent so that the shrunken Steve could be re-inserted into the scene, and finally with a body double mimicking Chris's actions in case the second technique were required. When Chris had to interact with other characters in the scene, we had to either lower Chris or raise the other actors on apple boxes or elevated walkways to make skinny Steve shorter in comparison. For close-ups, Chris' fellow actors had to look at marks on his chin that represented where his eyes would be after the shrinking process, and Chris had to look at marks on the tops of the actor's head to represent their eyes. These marks then had to be digitally removed in post-production.

The second technique involved grafting Chris's head onto the body double. This technique was used mostly when Chris was sitting or lying down, or when a minimum of physical acting was required, although the body double was an actor in his own right. Unfortunately, the body double also proved to be too large and we usually had to shrink his element before we could graft Chris's shrunken head onto the body. Both techniques were time-consuming and immensely complicated for the visual-effects team, but the end result is quite amazing.


For Captain America, Lola worked on over 300 shots, which were primarily the body transformation of Chris Evans, but also some work on the nose replacement of Red Skull (80 some shots). Neither of these were classic Lola anti-aging or beauty work, but like that work required Lola’s vast understanding of human form and skilled compositing.

Lola had three primary approaches to shrinking the 220 pound Evans to the 140 pound guy he needed to be, while maintaining Evans’ performance as closely as possible.

1. Body double / actor doubling for the entire body. The body double was English Shakespearean trained stage actor Leander Deeny (who even dieted for the role).

2. Digital head replacement / face projection – similar to the technique Lola used in The Social Network, where the actor is filmed with multiple cameras and this digital file is object tracked onto a body double’s (Deeny) body. For example, when Rogers was at the recruitment center – standing semi-naked in the queue, about to be rejected near the start of the film. This was only used in about 5% of Lola’s shots.

3. Shrink and scale the actor in the principal photography (no greenscreen) – a 2D scale of the actor Chris Evans. This was used in the majority – about 85% of Lola’s effects shots.

In addition to the central task of shrinking Chris Evans, all the surrounding action needed to be correct, including eye lines and props. Here a number of tricks that were done on set:

- Evans would walk with bent knees, Groucho Marx style, to be lower in shot (although if he was taking more than a couple of steps this was not done as his walk and posture would be wrong.

- Evans would take shorter steps. The character Steve Rogers needed to vary between 6 ft 4″ and 5ft 4″, so smaller Rogers would have a smaller pace naturally. If you tried to scale the walk in post, the feet would appear to slide relative to the ground. “He would seem to moonwalk,” joked Williams. Note: even body double Leander Deeny was 5ft 7″, a full 4 inches taller than ‘Skinny Steve’.

- Seats, such as Evans’ side of the taxi, would be lowered by several inches so his co-stars would naturally look down at him.

- Shirts and hats were oversized. For example, Evans wore the largest army helmet that could be found so that when he and the helmet were shrunk digitally – the helmet would look the same size as everyone else’s but he would appear to barely fit it. Shirt collars were also oversized, so that when Evans was shrunk, the shirt would appear normal but too big for him, again making him look frail.

- Evans’ co-stars would focus on his chin for shots where they was looking directly at him, so that when he was shrunk, their eyeline would line up with his lower positioned eyes. Evans in turn looked at the brow of his co-stars.

- If possible, production would remove things in front of Evans’ face. So when Rogers is crawling through barb wire during basic training, the filmmakers would shoot the real Chris Evans pass without foreground barb wire, and then add it back later based on the reference pass filmed with it in on another pass. This clean pass would allow the slimming down process to happen without the wire being in the way and the new correct-looking, correct scale barb wire added back on top would just sell the illusion.

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oyinbo film tricks no be for here... imagine if its Nollywood trying to render Mr. IBU