Avengers: Infinity War is easily one of the most technologically ambitious films of 2018, with artists and animators being called upon to create entire characters and worlds out of thin air. One of those challenges involved recreating Hugo Weaving's Red Skull without the involvement of Weaving himself. Actor Ross Marquand may have taken over that role this time, but the full story of bringing Red Skull to life in Infinity War is far more complicated.

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IGN's Jim Vejvoda recently interviewed Digital Domain's Kelly Port and Marvel Studios' Dan DeLeeuw about the technical challenges involved in recreating this iconic villain and establishing his new role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Be sure to explain our breakdown of how Red Skull was brought back within MCU lore Port revealed that the actual look and design of Red Skull was far from set in stone when production began. "There’s definitely kind of a wide spectrum of designs in terms of what he would look like," he said.Port continued, "Because it would be... do we get Hugo and put him back in makeup, and try to do it that way? But then he was teleported by the Tesseract, out of The First Avenger, to Vormir, so he was this kind of otherworldly thing. It was some version of the artwork where the Tesseract did very bad things to his appearance, so he was much more skeletal. We did kind of end up in this place that was kind of a place in between, and showed both that the Tesseract did affect him and choose him in some kind of way to be this character on Vormir to give you the rules of the Stone, and kind of went from there."This version of Red Skull was created entirely through CGI, using references materials from Captain America: The First Avenger. "What’s great with Marvel is, because it is a shared universe, you’ve got this extensive library of any character you want," said Port. "If you wanna go back to the first Iron Man, you go back to the first Iron Man, you get the armor for it. If you wanna go back to The First Avenger, you get the scans of Hugo in makeup, right? So any time we work with a character, we’ll photograph and scan them. So we can start from that as a starting point, and then basically modify that look until we got to Red Skull in the final version of the film."Surprisingly, this means that Marquand wasn't ever actually present during filming, as many had assumed. According to Port, "Ross ended up coming in later to do the voice. And so on set we had the stand-ins that were kind of performing when Red Skull was actually walking."It was one of the good things, too. Does he walk, is he slow?

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e kind of hit on this kind of ethereal feel to him, he’s kind of there, he’s kind of not," said Port. "We’d have folks with mo-cap outfits that would be there with Josh Brolin and Zoe [Saldana]. Then they’d kind of be there for the eyeline, and they would speak the lines, and then later on we went back and got the dialogue."All that effort clearly paid off, as Infinity War helped Disney bring in a total of over $7 billion at the global box office this year.Let us know what you think of Infinity War's Red Skull in the comments below.

Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter , or Kicksplode on MyIGN Reporting by Jim Vejvoda.