How Black Panther Used Real Horses To Make Fake Rhinos
At the end of Ryan Coogler's 2018 superhero film "Black Panther," the title hero (Chadwick Boseman) gathered on a Wakandan battlefield to face off against the vengeful Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) with M'Baku (Winston Duke) aiding Black Panther and W'Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya) aiding Killmonger. At one point in the battle, W'Kabi blows a trumpet and summons several armored rhinoceroses to knock over enemy combatants in an extended action-packed battle sequence. As one might predict, the bulk of this sequence's fantastical elements were realized using CGI, although there was also a lot of impressive fight choreography by Jordan, Danai Gurira, and many, many accomplished stunt performers. According to a 2018 article in VFX Voice Magazine, a set was built on a ranch in the state of Georgia, and there were a lot of enormous blue screens, used to key in the CGI-created backgrounds of Wakanda.
The rhinos were not played by real trained rhinos, sadly, and were mostly animated creations. The digital assets used to animate the rhinos were actually ported over from the recent blockbuster "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle," released in December of 2017. The rhino assets from "Jumanji" were created by the VFX company Iloura, which was eventually absorbed into its parent company Method Studios. The rhinos were merely given armor and painted markings to make them look appropriately Wakandan.
It seems that a lot of the people who worked on the rhinos also used the skin textures and animal movements they had learned to replicate for Bong Joon-ho's 2017 film "Okja." That film was about a massive, rhino-sized "super pig" being raised as the prototype for a cheap new food source, and learning to animate the animal was perfect for rhino models.
Okja's skin was then essentially wrapped around on-set horses who served as real-life models.
Jumanji + Okja = Wakanda
Visual Effects Supervisor Todd Sheridan Perry was happy to have the "Okja" team, noting that little training was required to shift them over to Wakandan rhinos. He said:
"All of the animators and the modelers and so forth who had spent a year developing the 'Okja' character now had all of this experience doing these quadrupeds of that size and then the riggers and tech animators had the muscle systems already in place. [...] And so some of our artists in the asset department, they just moved onto it and they just kind of knew what to do."
The VFX Voice article pointed out that many of the on-set rhino stand-ins were merely rhino-sized stick models. There was a scene, however, wherein W'Kabi rode on the back of a rhino, and that required him to sit on the back of an actual Clydesdale horse. Sitting on horses provided greater spatial clarity within a scene for the photographers, as well as better lines of sight for the actors; it's easier to fight an imaginary rhino when one knows where to look.
Perry also noted that, when a horse wasn't quite feasible, he would rely on a CGI model of Daniel Kaluuya. But it was a "really, really well-developed W'Kabi digi-double," he said. In order to avoid the notorious "dead eyes" that digitally created human doubles tend to sport, Perry actually removed (photographically) Kaluuya's head and deposited it skillfully onto the CGI body double. It wasn't Kaluuya's body, but at the very least, it was his facial performance. The animators would animate the CGI Kaluuya up until the moment he stepped off the CGI rhino, and then sync up the real footage of the actor with it.
No rhinos, horses, or Okjas were harmed in the making of "Black Panther."