Early on in Captain America: Civil War , audiences see a young Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) interacting with his parents in a hologram of sorts. He’s reenacting the last time he saw them before they were killed, but the way he wished it had gone. It’s uncanny, and for those of us that grew up watching him on film, it’s almost eerie how young he looks. We saw it before with Michael Douglas in Ant-Man, but this scene was far more extensive.

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During a Q&A to promote the DVD/Blu-ray release of the film, film editor Jeffrey Ford, visual effects supervisor Dan Deleeuw and sound editor Shannon Mills talked about what went into creating this scene. Deleeuw explained that they had a lot of early Robert Downey Jr. visuals to work with. “Basically what we did,” he said, “we went through and we put a kind of catalogue together of his earlier films. Part of the process was deciding what Robert should look like, as this younger version of himself. And we settled on kind of a mix between a couple films. It became more of a young Stark, than a young Robert, in a way.”So, once they had the look, they took his current performance and, according to Deleeuw, “…you actually take Robert’s face and warp it. You’ll go into your computer and you’ll take his face and basically massage it so areas as you age, that we’ve all experienced, you know, that kind of distort from when you were young—then kind of distort those back to when you were young, at an earlier age.”Deleeuw said that, because you lose a lot of detail as you “massage” the image, you have to find a way to put it back. “The imagery you’re working from, there’s a fine level of detail and as the face gets warped, a lot of that detail gets washed away. So then what you’ll do is you take a double, fairly close in facial structure, but then you’ll photograph that double in the same positions, [for example] how the face is oriented to camera. And you’ll steal detail from that younger person’s face, then reapply it to Robert’s face. And then you go and do clean ups on the hair.”“A really simple process,” joked Ford. “It’s not just warping the two-dimensional image. You’re going in and you’re warping three-dimensional mesh of Robert’s face and projecting the image back onto the mesh.”He continued, “Part of what made the shot even more challenging was the length of the shot. The idea that the guys wanted to do it as a ‘oner,’ one long shot. You kind of wanted to set up the idea that there is something off about the scene. He comes out and as it plays longer and longer—if it played like a normal scene, you would have cut. Normally that helps us out because if it’s a shorter shot, you can split that up between more people and get the work done quicker,” he said.Mills talked about getting the younger Downey Jr. voice right, mentioning looking at his performances in Back to School or Tuff Turf, which he did in the ‘80s. “But when we did it," he said, “we realized we had to pitch him up just slightly, but very little, because Robert, he acted it, too. It’s one of those things—it’s a combination of incredible visual effects, but also acting, because he performed it. He had to be that guy for that moment as well, because all the technical stuff in the world isn’t going to work if he didn’t act that. If these guys didn’t get a performance out of him. It’s that combination of those things.”Ford explained that they did this on Downey Jr.’s last day of the shoot because, after shooting the older version of Tony Stark in the scene, he had to go out and shave his beard and mustache to play the younger version of the character.Captain America: Civil War stars Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Don Cheadle, Anthony Mackie, Elizabeth Olsen, Sebastian Stan, Chadwick Boseman, Tom Holland, Paul Bettany, Emily VanCamp, Paul Rudd and Jeremy Renner. You can check out the scene on 3D Blu-ray Combo Pack, Blu-ray, DVD, Digital SD and On-Demand right now.