iron man and digital cinema 1

I know, after The Dark Knight, Iron Man feels like it came out about five years ago. But for the sake of my absence from blogging and the backlog of ideas I’ve been meaning to put up here, let’s look back.

To create the effect of the marvelous iron armor, a variety of technologies were used. From this article from Last Broadcast on “Tony’s workshop:”

For Stan Winston’s Shane Mahan and his suit design team, this required making a suit that could be worn in sections over the visual effects suit Downey wore. ‘The big challenge was trying to find ways to blend, cross-cut and inter- cut combinations of practical and CGI shots,’ says Mahan. ‘It would be absolutely foolish for me to think that I could pull off every shot in the practical suit, so we created a combination for Robert consisting of the chest piece, helmet and arm sections combined with a full-body motion capture tracking marker suit underneath. It’s a great way to blend the practical with the computer-generated effects, enabling ILM to bridge any gaps between the physical pieces.’

In this interview, Faverau says that part of the realism of the movie hinged on being able to show various parts of the suit being gradually constructed, culminating in Iron Man’s iconic red and gold Mark III armor. This trope in almost every superhero movie of the suit gradually being constructed or put on shows the gradual transformation of the human body into an icon, that is to say, into something that can be transmitted, disseminated, or broadcast.

This may take a few posts, but I’d like to consider the digital rendering of the superhero as symbolic of the inner workings of digital cinema itself. Iron Man, made up of various levels of physical reality, motion capture data points, and digital video encoding, is representative of digital cinema’s transformation of physical reality into transmissibility as such (1′s and 0′s rather than chemical inscription on celluloid). More to follow…