ILM Shares Iron Man Secrets

A visit with the effects wizards who brought the character to life on screen.

ILM recently invited IGN up to their headquarters in San Francisco for a day-long presentation by members of the visual effects teams from Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to promote the upcoming DVD releases of both films.

Since Iron Man will be on shelves first (available in stores as of Sept. 30), we'll start by sharing some of the secrets revealed by visual effects supervisor Ben Snow, visual effects art director Aaron McBride and animation supervisor Hal Hickel during their portion of the presentation.

Following a tour the company's new-ish facility on the site of San Francisco's famous Presidio -- which also houses George Lucas' extensive collection of international film posters as well as iconic props, set pieces and matte paintings from the many films ILM has worked on, from Star Wars to Ghostbusters to Transformers -- Snow, McBride and Hickel took turns showing off concept art and talking about the design process, from inception to finished product.

According to Snow, Iron Man was a project that ILM went after in a big way. That's unusual for a high-profile visual-effects company that's used to being approached by producers and directors, not the other way around. But the folks at ILM started lobbying for the project almost as soon as they heard about it. They put together a test with the help of sister company Skywalker Sound -- a proof of concept of sorts -- which demonstrated what they had in mind for the character.

"We don't normally do tests like that, usually not on-spec type things," Snow says. "But I walked over to the desks of a couple of our modelers ... and said, 'Oh, there's this Iron Man test,' and they just leapt out of their chairs with excitement. Iron Man has sort of got certainly a cult and a fanboy following, and we have more than our share of fanboys here at ILM, so they were really excited and a lot of other people were really excited. Everyone was really busy at the time working on Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean 3, but after hours we could get a little bit of time here and there and people would build models and a core group of just a few of us ended up doing a one-minute test piece."

For many of the digital artists at ILM, part of the attraction was being able to take on a character they loved, but was less well known among the pantheon of Marvel heroes, giving them more freedom to put their own spin on it.

"It's actually interesting because the character's not terribly well known," Snow says. "It's got a rich history and a rich legacy, but it's not incredibly [familiar], the general public doesn't all know it. It's not like Spider-Man, where it comes with a lot of backstory, which kind of was cool because you had a rich legacy to draw on, but it wasn't feeling like people would get too indignant if it was played with a little bit."

Another big draw for Snow and his team was the opportunity to work with director Jon Favreau.

"Jon Favreau, we felt as a director, had done some pretty interesting work in comedy, obviously, and drama, but also had shown an interest in visual effects in films like Zathura," Snow says. "But he was a fairly noted skeptic of computer graphics in film. And obviously Iron Man was going to need a lot of computer graphics. So we thought he'd be a pretty demanding client, and that was actually interesting as well, to us."

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