How Marvel Turned Chris Evans Into ‘Skinny Steve’ For Captain America: The First Avenger

Director Joe Johnston, editor Jeffrey Ford, and cinematographer Shelly Johnson also revealed more from their bag of tricks in the film’s official DVD commentary. Johnston said that the scene introducing the version of Cap he calls “Skinny Steve” was actually among the final scenes completed for the film. “Shooting him as Skinny Steve was really complicated because we had to adjust everything around him in addition to adjusting him,” he explained. “We knew we had to shrink him down so we had to take account of that for everything, the environment he was in.”

As the film’s director of photography, Johnson, noted, Lola Visual Effects “specializes in ‘cosmetic enhancement,'” which up until this point probably didn’t typically involve drastically changing the size of an entire person. “This is probably one of the most extreme cosmetic enhancements they ever had to do I would think,” Johnson said. According to the Lola website, the company first worked with Marvel on 2008’s “Iron Man,” and continued collaborating with the studio after “The First Avenger.” Their other MCU claims to fame include digitally de-aging Robert Downey Jr. for “Captain America: Civil War,” aging Hayley Atwell for “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and work on “Doctor Strange,” “Ant-Man,” “The Avengers,” and more.