Stunts·Sequences
Sequence-level rigging detail. The pole-cat poles, the decelerator manufacturers, the picture-car modifications, the named coordinators, and the SAG-AFTRA safety bulletins observed on set. Each entry ties back to the film page where the work appears.
Maverick test-flies the Darkstar prototype past Mach 10 against shutdown orders. The Darkstar mock-up — a full-scale practical airframe built at Plant 42 with consultation from the Lockheed Skunk Works — was static, but Scott Fisher's SFX team gimballed it on a hydraulic pivot to sell the buffeting. The flight footage cuts to plate photography of the actual Skunk-Works-derived A-12 airframe at Edwards.
A magic-hour beach-football scene in lieu of mission chalk-talk: practical sun-position blocking, four consecutive afternoons of 25-minute shoot windows, no electric supplements. Stunt coordinator Casey O'Neill choreographed the running pattern + tackle blocking; cast performed their own choreography over multiple takes.
Steve Rogers's confrontation with his own past self during the Battle of New York time-heist. Sam Hargrave performed both halves of the choreography to the working-take camera plate — first as Cap-A facing an empty mark, then as Cap-B reacting to the playback. The composite stitches the two passes together via plate-matching at the marble-floor pivot.
Black Widow's sacrifice on Vormir to retrieve the Soul Stone. Heidi Moneymaker performed the rigged fall from the cliff edge on a hydraulic decelerator system, with the upper section of the cable disappearing in compositing. The decelerator was tuned to produce a 6-G arrest profile in the last two metres so the body's pose at the bottom of the fall would read as motionless on impact rather than rebound.
K's opening retirement of Sapper Morton — a brutal close-quarters fight in the cramped protein-farm kitchen. Choreographed by Vic Armstrong's team; the practical kitchen-table impact (Bautista crashing through the table) used a Korda Studios-fabricated breakaway prop with foam-core supports.
Niander Wallace inspects a newly-decanted female replicant prototype in the Wallace Corp inner sanctum, and casually murders her — a single-line stab, performed in one take by Sallie Harmsen on a body-rig wrist-knife with a retracting-blade prop. The blood reveal is a practical Tom Savini-derived squib synced to the prop's retraction. Choreographed in tight 360° camera sweep.
Performers ride long carbon-fibre poles fitted to picture vehicles, swinging cab-to-cab while the convoy travels at speed. The pole-cat rig was designed in collaboration with Australian rigger Glenn Suter (ARK Stunts) — a rear-mounted carbon-fibre pole, counterweighted at the base, with the performer harnessed to a sliding ring along the pole length. A safety cable ran from the harness to a winch-controlled tether mounted on the chase vehicle.
The War Rig rollover sequence — the multi-axle truck collapsing onto its side mid-convoy — was performed practically using the actual picture-car War Rig with internal roll-cage reinforcement and a counterweighted impact rig. Multiple cameras (eight to twelve, depending on take) covered the sequence; reset between takes took roughly 24 hours.
The five-minute continuous-take grizzly bear attack — DiCaprio performed against a stand-in actor in a rough motion-capture suit; ILM's photoreal CG bear was animation-blocked to the stand-in's motion. The choreography combined practical impact + body-roll work by stunt double Mark Mottram with ILM's digital bear handoff in compositing.
Glass rides his horse off a 50-foot tree-lined cliff edge and lands in a pine grove below. Practical horse-fall stunt + pine-cushion landing rig + ILM CG horse for the in-air mid-flight beats. Stunt rider performed the take-off; Mark Mottram doubled DiCaprio for the on-ground aftermath.
Sandra Bullock spent the bulk of principal photography suspended on a 12-axis rig inside the Light Box. The rig's motion-control was timecode-locked to the camera move and the LED panel imagery — when Stone tumbled, all three motion vectors phased together as a single edited motion plate. Bullock performed extreme positional + rotational arcs over 80+ shoot days while wearing the prop NASA EMU suit. Riggers + stunt coordinator Steven Pope supervised every take.
Practical fire-bar SFX inside the Light Box capsule mock-up. Bullock performed at close proximity to a controlled gas-bar fed at 35 psi. SFX coordinator Neil Corbould (later Best VFX Oscar winner) supervised the gag with full medical + fire suppression on standby.
Cruise + cast performed actual G-loaded BFM (basic fighter manoeuvres) flights in the rear seats of VFA-122 F/A-18Fs. Cast underwent a Navy-administered "C-pole survival" training programme + centrifuge run before being cleared for the rear-seat flights. Flying instructors from VFA-122 ("the Flying Eagles") were in the front seat for every take.
The mass-portal opening at the climax — every prior Avenger arriving via Doctor Strange's mandala, Cap raising Mjolnir, the cavalry charge across the battlefield. Coordinated as a multi-day shoot across more than two hundred stunt performers, with separate units handling each character's entrance and rigging. The "Assemble" line and the leading charge were a single working day, with the wide-shot hero plates pulled from twelve cameras simultaneously.
K and Luv's climactic fight on the breached sea wall as the storm-surge crashes through the pylons. Practical water dump in Hungary — 10,000 gallons per dump cycle — with Sylvia Hoeks's drowning sequence performed on a sealed-air-line rebreather rig at depth, on a controlled-descent harness for the final sub-surface beat.