Underneath the suit, Batman is just a man trying to overcome his fears. Courtesy of The Moving Picture Co.

And, in theory, that’s all Batman is: a regular guy who has trained himself to the peak of human perfection in body and mind. Batman comes and fights his own demons and ours (both inner and outer), and does it in the bigger-than-life manner we have come to expect of our costumed adventurer/superhero characters. And while he may not have super strength or a spider-sense, he has the most advanced technology that Wayne Industries can produce, and the most up-to-date vfx that the industry has to offer.

How this technology was used, though, is not the way you would expect it would be in a typical summer superhero blockbuster. Nolan says he wanted to present “a more realistic take on his [Batman’s] story than we’ve seen in previous incarnations of the character. I wanted to treat it with a degree of gravity and with a sense of epic scope, but set in a world that is firmly grounded in reality.”

With that as his priority, Nolan had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern vfx world, and eventually saw the light. The visual effects boutiques he would use to achieve his cinematic goals included Double Negative, Rising Sun Pictures (RSP) and The Moving Picture Co. (MPC).

Paul Franklin, Double Negative’s visual effects supervisor, explained about his company’s most ambitious project to date: “Chris Nolan really wanted this film to be very much grounded in some sort of believable reality rather than existing purely inside some sort of graphic world that could only be achieved through the use of computer animation or whatever. And he always wanted to make it feel like that you might actually go to Gotham, that Gotham might be a real place, and that somebody could really do the things that Batman was doing.

“It was really interesting that in Batman Begins you saw Chris basically progress through all the various stages that visual effects have been through in the last five or six years, and going from the position where he was very reluctant to use extensive digital effects work, to the point where was pretty happy for us to go away and generate something entirely digitally, because we were getting what he wanted.

The digital artist working on the cityscapes subtly transformed Chicago into Gotham City. Courtesy of Double Negative.

“So we moved from a position where at the outset of the film, Chris was pretty adamant that he wasn’t going to have digital cityscapes, certainly not entirely digital cityscapes, in the film, to a position where at the end of post-production, where Chris is approaching his final cut of the film, where he’s coming up with new ideas for shots, and we’re able to generate them entirely digitally, because obviously there is no opportunity to go out and shoot new material at this point.”

Nolan’s bottom line is the story of the man inside the suit. And at its core, that story is about fear. The director, whose previous films have been Memento and Insomnia — both about men pushed to the absolute edge of sanity by forces beyond their control — is focused on what that emotion can do to a person and to a society. “It’s fascinating to me,” Nolan remarks, “the idea of a person who would confront his innermost fear and then attempt to become it.” If Marvel’s Daredevil character — another superhero revitalized, as Batman was in the 1980s, by writer and artist Frank Miller — is “the man without fear,” Batman could be said to be “the man with fear — but who rises above it.”

Nolan elaborates: “In the story, young Bruce’s accidental discovery of the bat-filled caverns beneath Wayne Manor results in a harrowing encounter with the terrifying creatures, leaving him permanently haunted by the memory. Nolan and [co-writer David] Goyer fused this seminal experience with Bruce’s subsequent guilt over his parents’ deaths, making his decision to remold himself in the image of a creature that wracks him with such fear and anxiety all the more remarkable and resonant.”

And how were those amazing, fear-inducing bat-effects achieved? According to MPC’s visual effects supervisor Rudi Holzapfel, “From the outset, Chris made sure, that the digital bats would look and act like real ones in his scenes.

“First, when scenes were shot that would later contain bats, we had various kinds of reference bats on set; these were stuffed bats of various sizes and tones. Each time bats were to be required in those scenes, Chris would take it on himself to walk through the set with these bats on a stick and film the references with the same stock as the scene. This gave us perfect references of how real bats would look in these environments.