 |
|
|
 |
4More Pages
|
||||||||
|
 Groundbreaking Special EffectsWhen Downey wasn't performing in the heavier and more restrictive full Mark III armor, he wore partial pieces of the suit, allowing him to move more freely during the action sequences. It was then the visual effects supervisor John Nelson's responsibility to work with Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the film's primary visual effects house, and Stan Winston Studios in blending the practical suit worn by Downey and the stunt team with the computer-generated Iron Man suit.
“Jon Favreau is very much about invisible visual effects supporting the story,” says John Nelson. “We talked a lot about stressing what the suit could do and not just creating a shot to show off the effects. Jon had a sign over his office that said `plausibility,' so that was our guideline in developing how we were approached the film from a visual effects standpoint.”
“What I like to do is strike a balance that mixes the visual effects with practical effects so audiences start to forget where one begins and the other ends,” says Favreau. “Sometimes that means cutting from one shot of Iron Man wearing the real suit to another that's completely a computer-generated image (CGI). What that does is force the people building the practical suit to make it move freely enough that you would believe it could be CGI, and it makes the CGI people honest because they have something practical to match it to.”
For Shane Mahan and his suit design team, this required making a suit that could be worn in sections over the visual effects suit Downey wore.
“The big challenge was trying to find ways to blend, cross-cut and inter- cut combinations of practical and CGI shots,” says Mahan. “It would be absolutely foolish for me to think that I could pull off every shot in the practical suit, so we created a combination for Robert consisting of the chest piece, helmet and arm sections combined with a full-body motion capture tracking marker suit underneath. It's a great way to blend the practical with the computer-generated effects, enabling ILM to bridge any gaps between the physical pieces.”
Visual effects supervisor Nelson enlisted the services of industry heavyweight ILM to handle the majority of the visual effect shots. Since 1975, ILM has been providing post-production visual effects services to the entertainment industry. Motion pictures, commercials, trailers, music videos and special venue projects have utilized ILM's unequaled artistry in techniques such as model making, matte painting, computer-generated imagery, digital animation and a variety of related processes required in the production of visual effects.
Groundbreaking software required for digital image production has been developed and shared with the industry at large and adopted by other companies and software manufacturers. ILM has been associated with 14 movies that have earned the Academy Award® for Best Visual Effects and has been awarded 17 technical achievement awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
“In the past I've always steered away from using CGI whenever possible because I felt that it sometimes takes you out of the reality of the film,” says Favreau. “But in the case of a movie like 'Iron Man,' there's no way to make it without using CGI.”
Favreau continues: “ILM has once again emerged as the flagship digital house for CGI animation. Their groundbreaking work on the `Pirates of the Caribbean' movies, as well as the technology they developed for `TRANSFORMERS,' made them confident that the digital effects would integrate seamlessly with our practical effects. Iron Man is the star of our movie and we needed an effects house with strong animators to bring that character to life in a way that would not distract from our story.”
In addition to ILM, Nelson also brought aboard the visual effects houses The Orphanage and The Embassy. “We endeavored to find the right people for the right sequences and raise the bar a notch,” says Nelson. “The technology is opening up right now, which allowed `Iron Man' to be made the way Jon Favreau wanted it. With large-scale visual effects movies, it's hard to provide a big spectacle that's plausible. Our goal was to shoot as much stuff practically as we could and add CGI extensions with multiple layers of different elements. We felt the more we combined techniques, the stronger it would become. We tried to go the extra mile so that audiences can watch and say, `Wow, that suit looks cool.'”
“John Nelson won an Academy Award for `Gladiator' and really did an excellent job of working within the parameters and constraints that I presented him with,” says Favreau. “I didn't want any effects that looked like they couldn't be achieved by a real camera. When Iron Man is flying I wanted it to feel like he is operating under the same laws of gravity and aerodynamics as a real airplane. We looked at a tremendous amount of reference material, and tried to bring a lot of reality to it. Hopefully that's going to bring a very cool aspect to the movie.”
|
|||||||||
Save to your Facebook.