Director Chris Nolan demanded a seamless match with the unforgiving nature of the original cinematography. 

BD: Paul, did you notice any parallels between Iron Man and The Dark Knight?

PF: Comparisons between Iron Man and The Dark Knight are interesting because they are both adapted from comic book sources but they both take very different routes making two distinct films that are each very successful in their own terms. For me, the greatest achievement in Iron Man's vfx work -- which is extremely impressive throughout -- is that they very successfully sold the high energy dynamism of the character without you ever really questioning whether a human being could live through all that. The gritty look of the CG suit perfectly matched the practical version to the point that you only really know that you're looking at CG when you spot something that couldn't possibly have been filmed for real (such as a metal man in supersonic flight). On The Dark Knight, we had a standard of reality that we had to match and Iron Man achieved a seamless reality that's entirely consistent with that film's own set of internal rules.

As a general observation about all of this year's nominees, it's very important to note that each film is a very strong piece of cinema in its own right. They're all really great movies, and that's not something that it's always been possible to say about previous years. This in itself is a major achievement; more and more really good films are making more and more use of large quantities of high-end visual effects work. This makes me very excited about the future of our craft.

Ben Snow, visual effects supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic.

BD: Ben, it's interesting how you've segued from Iron Man to Terminator Salvation. It must be fun to witness direct improvements in technology from one robotic film to another.

BS: Yeah, I actually like to jump back and forth in types of films. But I have to say there's a lot of variety in Terminator, maybe even more than on Iron Man. But what's great about being able to do this is that we've developed some new tools and techniques and approaches on Iron Man that we were able to leverage and extend further on this one.

BD: How so?

BS: Just in terms of the realism of some of the images and materials that we then could adapt to a slightly more stylized-looking environment. That just means that you need the realism to be even more spot-on. There's nowhere to hide: the grain's gonna be cranked up and the highlights are gonna go crazy in the treatment.

BD: Looking ahead to this year, what are your impressions of the hot topic of the moment, stereoscopic 3-D?

PF: It was great to see Journey to the Center of the Earth [in] 3-D at the bakeoff, as it's the herald of what could be as big an event in the history of cinema as the introduction of sound. If Avatar is as big a hit as it looks like it might be, then I think there will be a lot of productions that will be scrambling to add stereo to their films. Returning to the comparison with the advent of the talkies, you might even see shows that are in production reshooting chunks for stereo presentation in just the same way that several big nearly-complete silent movies were reshot with sound before being released.