Executive Producer Talks 'Guardians of the Galaxy' Visual Effects

One reason that everyone was surprised about the announcement that a Guardians of the Galaxy film was in production was the main character isn't just a guy in a crazy suit.  The team consists of, among other weirdos, an anthropomorphic raccoon and a walking tree.  Ten years ago that may not have been possible to do convincingly, but it seems difficult even today.  Recently, Cinemablend had an interview with Executive Producer Victoria Alonso for the scoop.

Cinema Blend: What makes me fascinated by the project is that you have five members of this team, and one of them is Rocket Raccoon, a talking raccoon, and another one is Groot, who is quite literally a walking tree. You’re obviously not putting a person in a costume for those parts. Are those going to be fully CG characters? Are there plans to use motion capture again?

Victoria Alonso: We’re going to do a combination. You can’t do any motion capture with a raccoon – they won’t let you put the suit on [laughs]. But we will do rotomation, probably, for some of the behavior. Rocket will have his own personality, of course, and clearly we can’t do mocap on a tree, per say, but we definitely will have performers to emulate what James Gunn will lead to be the behavior and the performance. He’s very clear on where he wants to take the characters.

His answer makes sense. Rocket Raccoon (yes, that is his actual name) is probably the biggest wild card of the whole production, and the idea of taking movements from real raccoons is an exciting one.

Guardians of the Galaxy will be released on August 1, 2015.