SUPERMAN VFX BREAKDOWN
to maintain. “Even though there are a lot of VFX in the film, we always try to base everything on something we can capture in camera,” he explains. “We pushed as hard as we could to go on location when needed,” he says, travelling to Svalbard to film the opening scene. In contrast, Metropolis was a backdrop – designed by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) – that was placed on an LED screen outside Lex Luthor’s tower and Kent’s apartment. For scenes at the Daily Planet , where Kent and Lane work, the crew travelled to Macon, Georgia and shot on location in an ‘old train station’, according to Ceretti. “On other projects, they might have put a blue screen outside. We said ‘no, no, no, let’s build a view’. It worked with the aesthetic we wanted – I don’t want to say it’s an old-school style, but using techniques Hollywood has forgotten about. There’s no reason not to do that if you have the right mindset and the right people,” he continues. “It makes it all look more real.” MAN’S BEST FRIEND Framestore’s Stephane Nazé was handed Gunn’s script for Superman in October 2023, right after GOTG Vol 3 had finished its theatrical run. “I was amazed by the script,” Nazé begins. “It was a different way to read Superman ; much closer to the comic books. It was really attached to the origin and spirit of the character.” Ceretti brought Framestore on board to handle two of Superman’s most iconic
to get feedback with real references in order to be consistent. We don’t want shots that don’t share the same vibe.” When actors interact with a computer-generated character, there’s generally a stand-in provided on-set. For Krypto, “that was a stuntperson sitting on the ground, so the actors knew exactly where the dog would be in the shot. Sometimes, it was a stuffed animal,” Nazé recounts. “For other shots, it was a real dog (named Jolene). It was there for framing, but also to give us technical information about the spec response, how the white fur reacts and the direction of lighting. Having stand-ins was super informative for everybody.” In the second half of the film, there’s a scene in which Lois Lane is driving Mister Terrific’s ship, and Krypto jumps into her lap. “We had Jolene physically on top of Lois,” begins Ceretti, “so that the interaction between her and Krypto would be as real as possible. It’s a lot of extra work to replace a real dog with a CG one, but it pays off in the long term, in terms of what we get out of the scene.” COLD AS ICE Superman opens on a glacier; there’s no one and nothing to be seen around. The audience reads a few sentences of text which quickly summarises the film’s intended backstory – that Superman has just lost his first fight. A few seconds later, he plummets into the snow, and Krypto appears, dragging him cape-first into his Fortress of Solitude.
BACK TO BASICS Ceretti’s team went old- school to revamp the iconic source material
assets: Krypto and the Fortress of Solitude. Framestore ultimately contributed nearly 600 shots – 541 of which were included in the final cut – but Nazé’s VFX team essentially started from scratch. “Gunn did the storyboard to get an idea about the shots and the framing, and to start evaluating the complexity of the work,” he shares. They kicked things off with Krypto, Superman’s small yet super-powerful dog. “That was the first brief we got – James said, ‘I want my dog to be Krypto’.” While Gunn didn’t actually want his dog Ozu to appear in the film, the animal did serve as the basis for Nazé and his fellow VFX artists. “We never animate without references,” he explains. “We got lots of elements, videos, clips,” he says, which helped ensure Krypto moved and behaved like a real dog. “We had a lot of material to play with, and also to use for animation development,” Nazé continues. “The animators need that; they need
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DEFINITIONMAGS
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