May 1, 2008 4:00 AM PDT
The challenges of crafting Iron Man's suit
Posted by Daniel Terdiman 6 comments
This poster of Iron Man flying is from a scene that mixes computer graphics--the Iron Man character--with real footage of a cloud-filled sky.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)
When the visual effects and animation wizards at Industrial Light & Magic started working on Paramount Pictures film Iron Man, their biggest challenge was creating a suit for the title character that was part CGI (computer-generated imagery) and part real costumery.
If you're not familiar with Iron Man, it's the story of Tony Stark, a genius billionaire industrialist who's also a bit of a jerk and who designs and sells weapons. In the film's opening sequences, Stark is demonstrating one of his weapons in some unspecified country near Afghanistan when he is captured by terrorists who demand that he craft a weapon for them. In the scuffle that ensues, he ends up wounded, with shrapnel lodged near his heart.
To make a long story short, Stark ends up making an iron full-body suit that protects him and his wounded heart, and along the way, he ends up going through a personality transplant and becoming a superhero instead of a force for evil.
But it all comes back to Iron Man's suit--a technical marvel that allows him to fly, shoot missiles, be impervious to many conventional forms of attack, and more. To watch video from the film, you see that the suit has no end of little flaps and compartments that all seem to operate independently and which are all essential to giving the Iron Man character his fully teched-out superhero flavor.
The problem was, according to ILM visual effects supervisor Ben Snow, that the traditional options for creating a suit like Iron Man's--either making it fully CGI or making it a fully real-life, physical, or "practical," suit--weren't going to work for this film.
"The suit has to do a lot more than just a suit of armor can do," Snow said when I visited ILM recently.
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