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Inspired by this question, in order to estimate the damage that would have been caused had Ultron's plan succeeded (or indeed would/should have been caused even though it failed) it is necessary to make a guess as to just how big Sovokia city, or the chunk of it lifted into the air, actually was.

The relative ease of evacuation suggests that it was rather small, perhaps only a kilometer or less across, but is there more direct evidence? (Perhaps some of the long shots show individual buildings that are also shown closer up?)

How big was Sokovia city?

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According to the film's SFX Supervisor, ILM's Ben Snow, Sokovia city was approximately 2km wide.

To start with, the city does not exist. “We filmed in several locations in Italy and the UK to cover the ground portions that happened in the street, so that gave us a lot of raw material for the design. But it ended up being one of our largest digital matte painting creations. We had this 2 kilometer expanse of city that we had to build as a digital matte painting, plus the ground that it is sitting on top of, plus the engines that are driving it, complete with the pipes and the infrastructure under the ground with bits of earth falling off it. To get it right we studied landslide footage, building demolition and earthquake footage.”

“So, we had to not only build it as digital matte asset but also lift it out of the ground with the edge of it breaking away and the buildings crumbling like they were in an earthquake. It became a very elaborate process. Our traditional pipeline had been aimed more at single building destruction, like at the end of the Transformers movie. Here we were destroying whole sections of the city. So, we basically built on our pipeline so we could turn a digital matte asset into a generalist asset made in 3DS Max, then we took it through our rigid simulation system and sent it back for rendering in the generalist pipeline.”

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