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The kingdom’s Marvel fans have a new reason to watch and cheer on the latest addition to the Marvel cinematic multiverse, as a Bahraini digital artist excitedly brings her creations to life.
Bahraini-British creative Zahra Fahad Abbas was part of the team of digital artists working on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, striving hard to make the magic onscreen happen in her job as a 3D generalist at Industrial Light and Magic in the UK.
Keen-eyed movie watchers can catch her name listed at the top of the digital artists’ credit at the end of the film, which has so far earned more than $300 million at the box office.
“In Ant Man, I did a lot of ‘digi-doubles’ – industry speak for digital doubles, which is where we take recordings of people for stunts or characters and we do a digital version or create a concept character,” the 28-year-old artist told GulfWeekly.
“There is a restaurant scene in the film and we were told that they needed it populated with lots of crazy characters – from big blue waiters to bee-looking people, and people made out of bubbles and bandages.
“I got to be part of the team that created these characters, and I worked on about five or six characters in that scene. It was really fun and a lot of work!”
The scene started off with a concept design from Marvel requiring 10 characters, but by the end it grew to be about 30 unique characters.
During her interview, Zahra recalled that one of the concepts she got was just ‘Lava Lamp Man’ and had to come up with options
within the assigned time frame for the client – Marvel – to pick from.
“There’s a constant feedback loop, where they might ask to make adjustments, either in the build of the character or to make them better work with the scene they are in,” she explained.
“Sometimes, we add on to existing effects while other times we have to come up with the concept from scratch.”
When asked about the constant debate between advocates of computer generated imagery (CGI) and makeup defenders about digital versus physical effects, Zahra is quick to emphasise that it’s about using the right tools in one’s arsenal to tell the story, without getting hung up on the effects.
In addition to having worked on Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and ABBA’s Voyage holographic concerts, the upcoming season of The Mandalorian features some of Zahra’s designs, as does the Ultraman movie set to be released in 2024.
