arvel’s first venture into filmmaking with the release of Iron
Man rocketed the 2008 summer season off to an excellent
start. Jon Favreau directed and ILM created many of the effects, along with Stan Winston Studio, The Embassy VFX, and a list of others. But in a rare departure from what so often is the norm, Favreau encouraged the artists to do more than create his vision. He let them create some visions of their own.
Oscar winners and ILM artists Doug Smythe, Digital Production Supervisor, and Hal T. Hickel, Animation Supervisor, and their digital effects teams worked on a little over 400 shots, mostly involving the Iron Man or Iron Monger related scenes. As expressed by Hickel, both were surprised and even a little intimidated at the unexpected creative input they were encouraged to provide. “This show was interesting because, while we were not directly involved with the previs, we were invited at a very early stage by Jon to contribute ideas, which was really nice. It’s one of those things that… we often want more opportunities to have creative input, and on this film, we were surprised at how much of that suddenly we had.”
On most films, the plates are shot with minimal VFX input. The editor cuts them together, and the sequence is sent to the VFX team with instructions how to add their work. Follow-up meetings with the director usually revolve around individual shot topics such as a character is moving too fast, or move that over there. “With Jon Favreau, when they would shoot it, cut it together and hand it to us, he would say, ‘You know, this really isn’t it yet, this is our first pass. You guys are the experts on animation.
We may have made choices about which takes we use or the order we put the shots that don’t serve the animation. So as you get into the animation, feel free to look at other takes and choose them instead, or reorder the shots and pitch it to us.’ It wasn’t like ‘do whatever you want and its fine with me,’ he was saying do whatever you want and show it to me, and if I like it, I’ll put it in. Because maybe we haven’t hit on the right combination of things yet, and as you put your animation in you will discover things, and I don’t want to get locked in too early. I want to take advantage of those discoveries.’”
For a long time the term 'post-production' has been quietly considered a misnomer for digital FX. Digital FX has become a staple throughout the production all the way through the pipeline, not just solving problems and adding bling, but creating complete scenes and workflows that affect the entire film and production. However, it is rare for a director to recognize the talent that supports this, and rarer still for one to realize the contributions that can be made towards the success of a film. It was such a surprise to Smythe and Hickel that at first they didn’t know how to react.
In their first meeting with Favreau, they were prepared for the standard critique, but instead, explained Hickel “Jon would say, ‘Lets take a couple steps back and look at this whole sequence and its place in the movie, how it’s serving the story. This shot might not even work anymore, we might not even need this shot.’ At first, we were like ’oh, boy’. But once we got our heads around what he was asking, we realized this was fantastic, awesome! For me, that was the most rewarding about this project creatively.
It was a neat project, a lot of fun to work on. I’m somebody who loves robots, mechanisms and technology, so there are a lot of reasons like that to be excited about this movie and have fun with it. But I think the thing I will remember and always want to talk about, was working with Favreau and how that differed from other projects I’ve been on. It was really pretty cool.”
Of course, the team had to remain within the confines of the licensed character, a heroic one that wore a suit of armor and could fly.
The live action Iron Man suit created by Stan Winston Studio was ideal for static shots, but a digital one was needed for movement and of course anything where Iron Man would fly. The practical version wasn’t just to be digitally matched, it needed to exceed it with better mobility and heroic proportions. “Marvel Comics seemed to have a precise mathematical formula to make him look more heroic, how the big the chest is supposed to be compared to the waist and the legs,“ said Smythe.
Marvel wanted the torso elongated, and the waist shrunk down, unlike true human proportions. “We had to make something that looked photoreal and be able to intercut with the live action suit, sometimes within the same shot, have part of the suit be real and another part be CG while making it look clean with nice motion and shape of the character.
Iron Man is about 6’3“, whereas Robert Downey Jr. is not that tall. The practical suit is built to fit his physique and size, so we had to have our suit be able to mix and match with the practical suit as well as the superhero size version.“
There was also the issue that Downey found the practical suit restrictive to his acting, as explained by Hickel. “Winston’s guys made these beautiful suits that were faithful to the Iron Man design, but they were hard to move in. We told Robert Downey Jr. if he couldn’t get into the pose or move the way he wanted to, we could add the suit digitally. When he saw that, he didn’t want to wear the practical suit at all, to the point where there were times when we almost wanted to bribe him to put the practical suit on.
He liked not wearing it, so we wound up doing more shots than we anticipated. But the bottom line was, he was more comfortable and felt better, so presumably his performance was better. For us, it’s all about making the performance better and not encumbering the actor.”
Regardless of pose, the Iron Man suit needed to appear sculpted, a perfect fit, and heroic without confining. While a comic book version has the liberty to ignore parts that might break the silhouette, the 3D version didn’t have that freedom. The solution was to create a system of overlapping panels that could slide and twist against each other, without bits and pieces poking out at odd angles.
The difficulty of creating realistic looking metal was a challenge, especially considering the constant mix and match of practical and digital costuming. The brushed metal practical suit had tremendous detail, and digitally creating a brushed bumpy surface would have required too much rendering power to resolve without flicker and aliasing. “We had to come up with some new technologies to simulate what happens to a brushed metal surface, both where you are up too close and when you are further away.” Smythe chuckled, “That required a lot of words you find in Siggraph journals. We are fully buzz word compliant with all of our technologies.”
What were some of those buzz words? Full anisotropic adjustable BRDF shaders with high dynamic range environment lighting capture for image based lighting, with capabilities to adjust lighting. “We actually sent some samples of the suits out to a lab to have them analyzed to get a measured BRDF of the surfaces, which we then replicated as closely as we could with our surface material shaders, again requiring a balance between the real surface characteristics and wanting to be able to tweak and adjust them per shot as needed. What comes out of the box mathematically is not always what you want. Sometimes the director will say, ‘I want the highlight there, not here.’ So you have to move the light and change the surface and fix things without breaking the things that they do like.”
arvel’s first venture into filmmaking with the release of Iron 
