Animatics are animated storyboards, created by filmmakers to help them create certain action-filled scenes in their movies. You’ve probably seen them in the special features sections of a number of DVDs and blu-rays. Now Federico D’Alessandro has released online a set of four animatics he did for The Avengers that aren’t on the film’s home video release that showcase scenes that were later dropped or changed in some way to how they appeared in the final film.
The first two show two different introductions for Tony Stark/Iron Man into the film. The first is an action set piece featuring him squaring off some (South American?) guerrillas, one of whom is armed with what seems to be a version of Iron Man’s repulser ray technology. As it scene doesn’t add anything to the overall story, although it does touch on the idea that Stark’s tech is starting to proliferate out into the world and into the hands of those who might not be as on the side of the angels as Stark is, I can see why it was dropped. The second one puts Iron Man at the scene of Loki’s arrival at the beginning of the movie, but I can see where this was dropped as it takes away focus from the core SHIELD characters – Col. Fury, Agent Coulson, Hawkeye and Maria Hill – that are the real highlight of the sequence.
The third animatic is an alternate version of Stark and Loki’s confrontation right before the battle of New York begins. The tone is slightly different and there are a couple of interesting things, including Loki’s reaction to the alien army coming through the freshly opened dimensional gate, that show that director Joss Whedon had a few ideas as to how the scene could play out.
Most interesting, is the fourth animatic. An early look at at the first part of the film’s climactic Battle of New York, it features another long-time member of the Avengers team from the comics – The Wasp! Whedon had mentioned that he had tried to work the character into the film but felt that her presence made an already over-crowded movie just a little bit too over-crowded. The clip lets us see how she might have been incorporated into the film’s climactic sequence.
