Iron Man 3 will have its North American premiere on May 3rd! These movies have a huge following with many fans all over the world, some of whom have followed the original Marvel comics and some of whom are just getting into the movies now.
Iron Man 3 comes after two hugely successful Iron Man movies, both of which were helmed by Jon Favreau with special effects by Industrial Light and Magic.
Director Jon Favreau trusted Industrial Light and Magic with the primary Iron Man suit special effects in the first movie after seeing Transformers and the work they did on that. He was primarily concerned with the suit being believable, particularly the transition between the physical suit and the suit that was created with visual effects. Stan Winston and his company were also involved in creating the physical suit itself.
In many parts of all three movies, the actors who don suits are usually wearing partial suits and helmets, along with motion capture suits so the “blanks” could be filled in with post-production effects. This is because the suits were extremely heavy, and it made it difficult to run and move around.
Gadgets and holographic interfaces were shot by the company Perception for Iron Man 3, but in Iron Man 2 these devices an interfaces were created by Prologue. It’s been said that holographic interfaces haven’t been such an important part of a movie since Minority Report, which came out in 2002. Motionographer has a great write-up of these effects with plenty of video, available here.
Visual Effects supervisor on the second movie, Janek Sirrs, said that they are constantly redesigning the visual effects sequences throughout the pre-production, with new things springing up during filming and then through to post-production. You can check out a full interview with him here: http://marvel.com/news/story/14131/creating_iron_man_2s_special_effects
There are three Iron Man films, with Industrial Light and Magic being involved in the visual effects for the first two films, with several other companies being responsible for the visual effects on Iron Man 3. These companies included Trixter Film, The Third Floor, Framstore, Weta Digital, Digital Domain and Scanline VFX.
With different companies working on the visual effects for the third movie and Job Favreau not in the director’s chair (Shane Black, who directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and has screenwriting credits on Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2 and Last Action Hero will be directing), it will be interesting to see how different the third movie will be from the previous two, particularly with the success and subsequent events of the Avengers movie. Are you going to go see Iron Man 3?