Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/147928
■ ARTISTS AT The Moving Picture Company (MPC) developed digital Superman's flying style. W hen Visual Effects Supervisor John Des Jardin sat with Director Zack Snyder to plot the visual effects for Warner Bros.' Man of Steel, one thing became clear: Snyder wanted the camera in the middle of the action. "He said that he didn't want to do the normal thing when you have stunt guys, someone gets hit, and the way we know [the superhero] goes over our heads or up into the sky is because the camera spins and then we have a digital takeover," Des Jardin says. "Zack didn't want the camera move to drive the animation. That's putting the cart before the horse." Des Jardin, who had worked with Snyder on Watchmen and Sucker Punch, first met with the director in November 2010 to talk about Man of Steel, the first Superman movie since 2006. In addition to Snyder, Christopher Nolan, who had rebooted the Batman series with a darker version of that caped crusader, was a producer and co-writer on the film. Preproduction began in the spring of 2011. Filming began in July 2011. Postproduction ran from February 2012 to February 2013. All told, three studios – The Moving Picture Company (MPC), Double Negative (DNeg), and Weta Digital – created the majority of the 1,500 shots, with Scanline handling an ocean-based oil rig rescue, and PLF, the previs. MPC did the Smallville battle, Superman (actor Henry Cavill) coming out of a fortress in the arctic and learning how to fly, the escape pod sequence, and present-day Kryptonian objects. Weta created everything on Krypton and Kryptonian interiors (see "Krypton," pg. 20). DNeg took care of all the visual effects in Metropolis (see "Metropolis," pg. 23), including building the gargantuan city, as well as a fight in the Indian Ocean involving a giant piece of Kryptonian equipment. In addition to the oil rig rescue, Scanline created a tornado. "The movie readily allowed us to split work on the film into sections to give to the vendors," Des Jardin says. "The Kryptonian things created at Weta, however, appeared in the rest of the film. And, everyone had a digital Superman. Even Scanline – they had a digital Clark Kent on the oil rig. But, MPC did the first primary digital Superman." Previs started with "stunt vis." Stunt coordinator and Second Unit Director Damon Caro, who had worked with Snyder and Des Jardin on Sucker Punch, took the first stab at choreographing the fight scenes. "He shoots his stunt vis in a training facility," Des Jardin says. "He has sound effects, and he uses [Adobe's] After Effects for bullet hits and sparks. Zack [Snyder] buys off on the stunt vis. Then we tear it apart, asking, for example, if we can do a wire rig here, CG there." Next, Des Jardin worked with Kyle Robinson, previs supervisor at PLF, where artists were building a version of Smallville and Metropolis. "Kyle, Damon, and I did a performance-capture version of Damon's fights," Des Jardin says. "We used three prosumer cameras to record the motion, and then Kyle hand-animated the fights for the previs. Smallville was straightforward, but Metropolis was different. It was citywide. We didn't have that space, so we made it a Western gunslinger fight using a saloon made of boxes. A character throws a glass on the floor as a challenge. Someone gets thrown out the window." Later PLF's previs artists might fly the character from the window to the top of a building. "The nut we had to crack for this movie was that in Smallville, when Superman fights Kryptonians, we wanted CG W July / August 2013 ■ 19