Monday, February 25, 2008

WonderCon...Iron Man

Several sites are talking about Richard Hatch’s appearance at WonderCon this past weekend in San Francisco, including Great White Snark, io9, and OhGizmo. (IDK, snark has its place but I'm not sure the fragile Con ecosystem can handle it...*g*)

IRON MAN producer/director Jon Favreau gave props to Battlestar Galactica’s style of virtual cinematography visual effects this past weekend at his panel, describing how it inspires his FX team:

Favreau is known for disliking CGI and only using it when necessary, which is both good and bad. In IRON MAN, he found a balance between using the two.

"The action is a set piece, so it has to propel the story… In this case it's a fight, it's action, it has to do something metaphorically, right?"

"Because there was so much CG, I didn't want to just have virtual cameras flying around. And so we found a great practical air-to-air film, like TOP GUN, and we said this was all real, this was before CGI - how did they film it? What did they have to do? These long lenses… And then you looked at the making of it, there's a look. It looks different than STEALTH. STEALTH, the camera does this, it does this, it's got a short lens, it frames everything perfectly, and it goes for a different aesthetic, it goes to be speculator. In TOP GUN, they're trying to line the two planes up, it's so hard to keep them both in frame. Sometimes it buzzes…"

"Who does it good? BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, the TV series. They do it very well. It's very charming what they do. They'll admit, they miss, they zoom, they rack, it's almost becoming a motif in that, like the shaky camera on NYPD BLUE, but it's there. It's like, look at this, why is this cool? It should look like an air show. When something blows up, you zoom in and miss it, you try and get it. It looks like a YouTube video. And then it becomes about, okay, here are the rules."
[quote and photo via FirstShowing]

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