One thing the newer crop of superhero and sci-fi films are doing right is using effects to enhance the story, not overshadow it.

DF: There have been, over the past 10 years or more, a whole raft of visual effects-filled superhero and science-fiction films. In the evolution of the technology and the ability of things you can do, how have things progressed since the Spider-Man films, the X-Men films, The Matrix and Star Wars?

PF: The most satisfying thing in the way that visual effects have developed over just the last few years, over the films that you mentioned, is that filmmakers, directors, screenplay writers, and art directors, have all really begun to embrace the possibilities digital filmmaking allows them.

In the case of Batman Begins, it’s a sort of hybrid approach of very traditional techniques and state-of-the-art digital effects techniques all combined together to make a film which is an enhanced version of what you would be able to achieve if you were just doing it traditionally. It was really interesting that in Batman Begins you saw Chris Nolan basically progress through all the various stages that visual effects have been through in the last five or six years. He went from being very reluctant to use extensive digital effects work, to the point where he was pretty happy for us to go away and generate something entirely digitally, because we were getting what he wanted.

It’s almost like there’s been a real maturing of the visual language of visual effects, so that it’s now become incorporated into the broader language of cinematography in general. A lot of the stuff that we refer to as traditional, 60, 70 years ago were state-of-the-art. When somebody came up with the idea of doing matte paintings f or Douglas Fairbanks in Thief of Baghdad, that was pretty radical stuff. Before that it was a case of, well, surely you just go out and film stuff that’s real and cut it together and that’s how you made your film. The effects technicians of the day were taking it further. Then, because you give it this sort of credibility of history, suddenly it’s an established visual technique. Really, all we’re doing with digital special effects is taking that kind of thing one stage further. We’re offering greater flexibility. We’re offering a broader palette that the filmmakers can paint from. That, for me, has been the real key to the way things have developed.

DF: What’s coming up that you’ll be able to do with visual effects — in two years, in five years — that you can’t do now?

PF: In terms of where it’s going, I think you can imagine that process going even further. Instead of digital effects being something that’s done at the end of the day, after the film has been shot, we’re now beginning to see more and more films being made in the way that we did Batman Begins. The visual effects teams are brought on very early in the filmmaking process, so we can actually contribute to the whole creative process in which the decision-making’s getting made up front.

Some of the stuff that I was really pleased with in the work that we did was the way that, for instance, whenever we flew the helicopter down the streets of Chicago, the city authorities cleared all the traffic from the street, so there’s nobody on the street, so it just looks like it’s deserted. But, obviously, we had to bring the life back, so we had to return all the traffic and all the pedestrians to the street, and they’re all created digitally and added in there. Those are just the sorts of incidental things that give filmmakers a greater scope to realize their work. I think you’ll start seeing stuff where the actual stock from the pre-visualization process of filmmaking, where at the moment we use very low-resolution animation, very sort of sketchy, basically like moving storyboard, in a couple years time, you’ll be able to do stuff that actually looks like the finished thing at that stage, to really give the filmmaker an idea of, well, what are you going to do? Where are you going to take it?

So they won’t have to guess, they won’t have to cross their fingers and say, “I hope these guys can make this look totally real.” You’re going to see increasingly realistic humans created digitally, and you’ll also see, I think, landscapes and environments. You look at something like the recent Star Wars movies, and there are some incredible landscapes and environments in there. But they work because they are fantasy environments. But re-creating scenes and environments of historical things which are long past, yet making them feel like you could actually be there and really see them, that’s the sort of thing I thing I think you’re going to see more and more of.

I also think you’ll start seeing filmmakers using visual effects in a non-realistic way, by which I mean the kind of work that we saw in films like The Matrix and Twister, where you’ve got a subjective approach to the way that the film is made. Events will be portrayed from the observer’s point of view rather than some sort of slavish adherence to objective photorealism, whatever that means. In other words, a more expressive way of using visual effects, rather than it just being eye candy.

Danny Fingeroth was the longtime editorial director of Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man line and consulted on the 1990s Fox Kids Spider-Man animated series. He has written hundreds of comics stories, and written and developed characters and scripts for animation, most recently episodes of 4Kids Ent.’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Fingeroth is also the author of Superman On the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society (Continuum), and puts out Write Now! Magazine, the premier publication about writing for comics and animation, through TwoMorrows Publishing. He teaches Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels and moderates seminars with Graphic Novel creators at New York University and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Fingeroth is a frequent guest on radio and television (including E! Ent. Television, the Today Show and NPR’s All Things Considered), commenting on comics and on popular culture in general. His op-eds and comments on superheroes and pop culture have appeared in many newspapers and websites, including the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, USA Today and cnn.com.