Last week, we found out that Chris Pratt (Zero Dark Thirty, Parks and Recreation) had landed the coveted lead of role of Peter Quill in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which will be directed by James Gunn.  While that casting announcement answers who will be the Starlord, the question still remains as to how his fellow Guardian teammates will look.  In the comic, the majority of the characters are non-human looking aliens.  One character, Rocket Raccoon, is a walking talking raccoon (go figure) and another character, Groot, is a talking tree.  So, how will Marvel and Gunn go about creating these characters in a world that must also be an expanded part of a Marvel Universe that already features characters like those seen in The Avengers?

The answer comes to us today via Cinema Blend, who spoke with the Executive Producer of The Avengers, Victoria Alonso, and ILM Visual Effects Supervisor, Jeff White, about how Guardians will look with these characters.

Cinema Blend: What makes me fascinated by the project is that you have five members of this team, and one of them is Rocket Raccoon, a talking raccoon, and another one is Groot, who is quite literally a walking tree. You’re obviously not putting a person in a costume for those parts. Are those going to be fully CG characters? Are there plans to use motion capture again?

Victoria Alonso: We’re going to do a combination. You can’t do any motion capture with a raccoon – they won’t let you put the suit on [laughs]. But we will do rotomation, probably, for some of the behavior. Rocket will have his own personality, of course, and clearly we can’t do mocap on a tree, per say, but we definitely will have performers to emulate what James Gunn will lead to be the behavior and the performance. He’s very clear on where he wants to take the characters.

Alonso also said that Gunn is in London and production is fast underway.  Principal photography for the film will begin in June.

Guardians of the Galaxy opens August 1, 2014.