CASE STUDY

Frank Shi

VFX

I. Introduction

• A. Iron Man 2, a sequel to the first Iron Man, produced in 2008. The film is directed by Jon Favreau, the film start Robert Downey Jr, plays the main hero, Tony Stark.
• B. Even though Robert Downey Jr takes up the most shine of the screen time, the real co-stars of the movie are the designers and visual effects artist that made the whole movie together.
• 1. The Motion Graphcis part of the film is done by Prologue and Perception NYC.
• 2. The Visual Effects part of the film was done by Double Negative VFX and was led by supervisor Ged Wright.

II. Body

A. Prologue, Iron Man 2 Interface.

• 1. Interface has never played a make role in a movie, but for Iron Man 2, Prologue took the 2D interface design and uplifted it from the ground to create a unique 3D world around Tony Stark.
• 2. Prologue introduced the idea of Motion Graphics into mass media and it was interesting to see how the motion takes form and how the visualization of the motion graphics takes lead of the whole piece.
• 3. The challenge for Prologue was to smoothly intergrade the movement of Downey to the graphics they were creating.

B. Perception NYC provided Iron Man 2 with a simple graphic package.

• 1. Perception NYC was ask by Marvel Studios to do a video for Stark Expo, designing Tony’s PDA interface, coffee table interface and many more.

• 2. After Perception presented their concepts and styleframes of what they believe the interface of Stark’s hologram would look like, they were assigned many shots to enhance in the movie with the style they came up with.
• 3. For each of the shot Perception NYC had to do, they started out with a generic layout and eventually the final product of the interface as they kept sending styleframes back and forth to Jon Favreau, making sure the director knows how the final product of the piece looks like and feel like.

C. Double Negative took on one of the challenging scenes in Iron Man 2.

• 1. Double Negative created the whole Monaco Grand Prix Scene with six vintage cars, according to a interview on VFXTalk, with one of the supervisors Victor Wade. The crowds created in the shot was all done in CG and broken up to create different crowds and reactions.
• 3. According to the interview, the whole process of these 250 shots presented numerous challenging problems that the studio had to solve and improve as they go alone the movie. Using reference material on set to provide the compositors a better judgment of framing and the feel of the piece.
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III. Conclusion

• The work on Iron Man 2 covered a very wide range of work, which includes extensive CG environments, CG cars, hero creature work for Iron Man, complex FX compositing and problem solving for the whips. And lots of motion graphic elements that gave the Iron Man 2 a very unique feel and style to it.