The Oscars: Snow Talks Iron Man 2

ILM's supervisor on Iron Man 2 discusses heavy metal CG and what lighting tricks can be applied to the next Pirates sequel.

By Bill Desowitz | Friday, February 4, 2011 at 2:16 pm

Posted In | Magazines: VFXWorld | Site Categories: Awards, CG, Films, People, Visual Effects

Check out the Iron Man 2 trailers at AWNtv!

In the end, ILM pushed the CG armor a lot further. © Marvel and Paramount, courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic.

Iron Man 2 raised the bar for ILM in terms of attaining more of a real world look from the CG armor and new lighting tools. Ben Snow provides a greater overview of their achievements.

Bill Desowitz: Were you surprised at all by the nominations?

Ben Snow: Well, I was sort of surprised that Tron wasn't included. But I certainly can't begrudge the other nominations. I think it's cool that the expansion of the list allows for films that have more supporting visual effects. Like Hereafter, gets a chance to be part of the Oscars as well, which is a good thing.

BD: We originally talked at length about the importance of the new lighting tools on Iron Man 2. Briefly, what were some of the other advancements?

BS: We basically gave ourselves more tools to use the image-based stuff more easily and quickly and re-projected on set and browse images and extract lights from images -- all of that sort of thing.

BD: This gave you more of a real world look.

BS: It was both that and Jon Favreau having faith after what we could do on the first one. He really expected that the digital costuming would hold up on a variety of shots.

The new image-based lighting system lent a more real world vibe.

BD: And was it difficult to meet those expectations?

BS: In the end, no. One thing we didn't have from the first film was a situation where we were forced into a position of scrutinizing the suit and why it doesn't look like the Legacy suit. I suppose we could've made it easier on ourselves going entirely CG, but Jon and Janek [Sirrs] and I felt that keeping the real suits in the mix, at least for some of the earlier parts of the movie, kept us honest. But it was funny because what we were able to do with War Machine, for example, was push the metals beyond what they could with something that anyone could wear in real life. So it meant that when we were freed up from having to match the real suits, we were able to play with materials more, again, using real world materials as the basis.

BD: What alterations did you make to Iron Man to make it a fair fight?