In an early script draft for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. two, writer and director James Gunn described the opening sequence equally "the greatest title shot e'er." And if you've already seen the summer's first major blockbuster, y'all know it pretty much lives upwardly to that lofty goal.

There are a lot of reasons behind the scene's success, not the to the lowest degree of which is Baby Groot shimmying to the sounds of ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky." Just every bit our diminutive hero cuts a space rug, his friends are engaged in a pretty epic battle with a gargantuan viii-legged space monster called an Abilisk. The soundtrack may be what hits your soul, but the fantastical visuals are what hit y'all in the eyeballs.

Fast Company talked to Framestore animation supervisor Arslan Elver about the sheer amount of VFX heavy-lifting involved, and here are half dozen things that made it one of the about difficult scenes of the entire moving-picture show.

All In One Shot

The camera doesn't cut once, meaning Framestore'southward artists needed to create 800 frame-long furnishings, and had to run simulations that were thousands of frames long. The work was carve up into eleven parts, and divvied up among the store's animators. It took them from the finish of Baronial 2016 until end of February 2017 to make it. "Information technology's one large shot, merely internally we split that up into 11 pieces, and each piece is at least 500 frames, a minimum of xx seconds," says Elver. "Plus, in each shot, there are at least five characters–Babe Groot, the Abilisk, maybe a CG Drax getting slapped on the ground, there'due south just a lot of stuff to look subsequently."

Urban center of Gold

The battle takes place atop a golden city on the home planet of the Sovereign, which means the entire prepare is reflective. VFX supervisor James Fawkner recently wrote in a Framestore web log mail that it forced the shop to develop a brand-new suite of tools to create the space cloudscapes, and have them move realistically. "The clouds motion in a time-lapse, alongside bolts of lighting that needed to react within the clouds and calorie-free the city beneath," he wrote. "The city itself is fabricated of gold, which posed its own problems as information technology needed to reflect on everything and anybody in the scene."

Babe Groot Dance Moves

We know James Gunn was the model for dancing Baby Groot at the end of Vol. one, merely it turns out the managing director once again called himself into dance duty for the sequel. "Using a reference from James of him dancing, nosotros began to build the sequence," says Elver. "One matter that became an event quite quickly was that James was dancing on the spot, just Infant Groot needs to movement frontwards. Then we had to come up up with some clever solutions to play with the perspective." Like, say, riding what appears to exist some sort of space rat animal.

Slowing Things Down

Merely as the action is about to really kick off, the film title hits the screen and there is a Matrix-like moment, when things deadening right downward and the camera turns. "That wasn't originally planned," says Elver. "Information technology became clear that he was constantly dancing, but we decided to become for a slowed-down moment, to keep it tranquillity and subtle, just as the chaos behind him gets crazier and crazier."

Intergalactic Collaboration

Elver says that the workflow passed various sections across different departments, each responsible for a different aspect of the shot. "First comes animation, then it moves to creature furnishings, where they piece of work on how the fabric looks, or how the Abilisk tentacles intersect with the ground, and then there are the people who put in all the lasers and shooting," he says. "Then there's always this back and forth between these departments. Like if a graphic symbol is not animated aiming their weapon correctly, which happens a lot, it has to exist corrected."

Reality Check

As VFX-heavy as it is, there are actual real shots in the scene. "But a few," says Elver. "When Gamora says hi to Groot, and when Drax falls next to him." It's understandable, however, if you still feel immersed in the intergalactic world of the movie, long after information technology'southward over.