Oscar winners and ILM artists Doug Smythe, Digital Production Supervisor, and Hal T. Hickel, Animation Supervisor, and their digital effects teams worked on a little over 400 shots, mostly involving the Iron Man or Iron Monger related scenes. As expressed by Hickel, both were surprised and even a little intimidated at the unexpected creative input they were encouraged to provide. “This show was interesting because, while we were not directly involved with the previs, we were invited at a very early stage by Jon to contribute ideas, which was really nice. It’s one of those things that… we often want more opportunities to have creative input, and on this film, we were surprised at how much of that suddenly we had.”

On most films, the plates are shot with minimal VFX input. The editor cuts them together, and the sequence is sent to the VFX team with instructions how to add their work. Follow-up meetings with the director usually revolve around individual shot topics such as a character is moving too fast, or move that over there. “With Jon Favreau, when they would shoot it, cut it together and hand it to us, he would say, ‘You know, this really isn’t it yet, this is our first pass. You guys are the experts on animation.

We may have made choices about which takes we use or the order we put the shots that don’t serve the animation. So as you get into the animation, feel free to look at other takes and choose them instead, or reorder the shots and pitch it to us.’ It wasn’t like ‘do whatever you want and its fine with me,’ he was saying do whatever you want and show it to me, and if I like it, I’ll put it in. Because maybe we haven’t hit on the right combination of things yet, and as you put your animation in you will discover things, and I don’t want to get locked in too early. I want to take advantage of those discoveries.’”

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