For the 1,400 final vfx shots in Superman Returns, the work was divided among 11 companies, including The Orphanage, which created the stunning eye shot sequence above. All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures. 

“http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=1e242f07&atype=articles&id= 2926">Superman Returns is certainly different from the X-Men,” admits supervisor Mark Stetson, who oversaw 1,500 vfx shots (if you include the deleted opening sequence on the dying planet Krypton), reduced to 1,400 for final release. “There is a lot of respect for the Superman character from all of the filmmakers. There’s a lot of story and he’s deeply enmeshed in U.S. and world culture. I think we all worked within that context of iconography. We didn’t want to mess with him too much and deviate from the storyline. It was more like taking the cultural context and bringing the story forward to 2006.”

It’s not surprising, then, that a franchise reboot of this magnitude would be divided among 11 companies (including Sony Pictures Imageworks, Rhythm & Hues, Framestore CFC, Frantic Films, The Orphanage, Rising Sun Pictures, Photon, Pixel Liberation Front and Eden FX). But what was unusual, according to Stetson, was the level of cooperation amid the challenges and pressures. He partly credits the first-time use of the Genesis digital camera. With the Genesis as a “digital hub,” courtesy of Scott Anderson and his company, Digital Sandbox, all the vendors were thrown into new territory together.

“That set us from the beginning in being collaborative and not competitive,” Stetson contends. “The camera’s terrific. It gives beautifully crisp and sharp images. It was designed to be an effects camera, to pull mattes very cleanly so the edges are very sharp. And so what happens is you do your first greenscreen and the edges are so sharp you think it’s wrong. It looks like a bad pull and you want to soften the edge. The difference is that film has a natural roll off between one color value and the next. And the Genesis does not. One pixel is one color and the next pixel is bluescreen or greenscreen. It’s very precise, which is great for hair.

“We had to create our own post-production pipeline for getting shots in and out and getting them converted to Genesis native format files that the vendors could use, creating standards for color space amongst the various facilities and figuring out how to check shots on the way in because we weren’t filming out. We worked really hard with Digital Sandbox, which contributed to that process and provided all the technology needed to conform as well as the shot IO. Tom Siegel, our cinematographer, was very aggressive in using the camera and capitalizing on its strengths. He tested the camera and figured out what its capabilities were and pushed them. You look at it and say, ‘Nice movie.’ It’s a viable camera system and there are about a dozen movies using it. It’s not a magic bullet. It has its limitations, just as film cameras do. In some cases, we’ve seen the limitations and have to go to film for high-speed work and underwater housing quickly because you had to come up with a cooling system for it, but we did figure out how to use it for motion control speed shooting as well as cable flying all over the place. We tortured that camera.”

Chris Batty’s work on the Listening Post sequence for PLF pushes the use of previs in terms of the look and feel and emotional resonance.