Having Hope Van Dyne be front-and-center in Ant-Man and the Wasp was a big deal. Before that film, a female hero had never had her name on a Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Her appearance, and subsequent success, shifted the Marvel movie landscape in way that hadn’t happened in 19 previous films. So yeah, it was very very important.
Yet, Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) isn’t the film’s only heroine. Danielle Costa also deserves some credit. Marvel's head of VFX (she’s worked on every MCU movie since the first Thor) was the one responsible for making sure all of the Wasp's—and Ant-Man's—stunts looked as real as possible. And in a universe where the scale goes from larger-than-life to sub-atomic, that's no easy task. But it was one that was important to Costa because of the gravity of the film.
"What was really cool about this particular movie is the first time the female heroine got her name in the title of the film," Costa says. "She really came to life in a totally different way and we saw a whole other side of Hope Van Dyne in this film than we had in the first film."
How did Costa do that? Well, for one she helped fine-tune the Wasp's costume, shifting it from a more dragonfly-like design to one "more tech-y." She also made sure the heroine’s kitchen-fight scene—you know, the one where she shrinks and runs length-wise down a knife some bad guy threw at her—looked impeccable. "You have to be able to convincingly integrate live-action photography with computer-generated elements, artfully," Costa says.
Find out more about the artist’s VFX tricks in the video above.