How Framestore made Guardians of the Galaxy's Skull City

Silly space romp Guardians of the Galaxy was one of our favourite 3D movies of 2014. So we're excited to see Framestore has just released this new VFX breakdown video showing how they created Knowhere, a renegade three-mile city carved out of a giant space skull.

As you can glean from the video, this was a mammoth project for Framestore. "It was assembled from an astonishing 1.2 billion polygons, making up around 250 different models of buildings, pipes, railings, and lights," VFX supervisor Kyle McCulloch told us on its release last year.

These were not just cookie-cutter elements either, McCulloch reveals. "Framestore designed different neighbourhoods with different colours and different types of houses, each with a backstory and enough complexity to make them seem real."

An unprecented amount of work, then - but for the VFX supervisor, it was a joy and a pleasure. "Marvel have an incredible group of production designers and art directors who work for them," he stresses. "So we had a wealth of concept and design work to start our work with."

You can find out more about how the movie was created in the full interview here.

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