The suit makes the Iron Man. Courtesy of ILM. © 2008 MVLFFLLC. ™ & © 2008 Marvel Ent.

3. Iron Man
How to make Robert Downey Jr. put on the Iron Man armor and look like a believable superhero? That was the challenge that director Jon Favreau required of Industrial Light & Magic and they achieved it with their customary brilliance and flair. Thus, a more realistic CG approach was tackled at the outset by VFX Supervisor Ben Snow, who did an early test for Favreau and John Nelson, the overall vfx supervisor. And the demands of Imocap were more complex than on the Pirates of the Caribbean films: To make the visible parts of Downey match with the CG parts of Iron Man required extremely accurate tracking. "On this, where you have a shot where Robert is walking around and it's basically his real head and we're adding the suit all over his lower body, it really had to be spot on or his head would slide around and it would look weird," explains Animation Director Hal Hickel. In animating Iron Man, Hickel says they tried to give the armor a sense of weight and power without making the armor seem clumsy or slow. Meanwhile, The Orphanage was instrumental in developing the look of Iron Man's RT thrusters, as well as the heads-up display seen from Tony Stark's point of view when he's operating the armor.

The bar was raised on The Dark Knight in which vfx and special effects combined seamlessly into a coherent and consistent look. ™ & © DC Comics. Courtesy of Warner Bros.

4. The Dark Knight
Maintaining the realistic approach to vfx that proved so successful on Batman Begins, the bar was raised on The Dark Knight in which vfx and special effects combined seamlessly into a coherent and consistent look. Nick Davis oversaw a global effort, in which Double Negative once again handled most of the Gotham environments and action (including the marvelous IMAX shots) and Framestore tackled intricate Two-Face CG work for more of a subtractive effect. "Chris Nolan had had a very positive experience with the work that had been achieved on [Batman Begins], and he wanted to maintain the same gritty, super realistic approach to the visual effects," Davis explains. "He wanted a movie to be as 'un-effectsy' as possible. The shots had to feel real. To this purpose, we did a lot of location work, whereas on the first movie, the majority of the scenes had been captured on stage. The fact that we shot on location, notably in Chicago and Hong Kong, allowed us to ground the movie in reality. We shot as many real elements as possible."