Once again, Favreau had Stan Winston create a real version of this suit, but what you're looking at here is completely computer generated. The Mark 2 would have to be sleeker and more refined and have a polished coat that would accurately reflect light like the night sky in this scene. Winston Helgason: We learned a lot about car paint, about clear coat, how light plays on cars, how they react to their environment, which, they're essentially mirrors of their environment. The digital version was so detailed that it even captures these text markings and textures.Īnd to create a realistic metallic reflection, The Embassy used the knowledge they learned from working on car commercials to influence how they shaded the digital version of the suit. They modeled the digital suit closely after the real suit, even going so far as getting pieces of that real suit flown to Canada for reference. Their accomplishment wouldn't have been possible without the practical work from Stan Winston's studio.
That left the challenge of creating the first digital Iron Man suit audiences would see up to The Embassy in Vancouver. And for the project, Winston's team perfected a metallic chrome paint that would be used for other projects years down the road.īut the film had to rely on CGI for this section of the scene, because the practical suit was just too large for either Robert Downey Jr. For that first bulky cave suit, he enlisted the help of the legendary Stan Winston Studio, now called Legacy Effects, to make this 90-pound version of the Mark 1 with epoxy armor shells, flexible urethane, leather, and aluminum.
"Iron Man" director Jon Favreau is known for pushing the envelope with his projects like "The Lion King" and "The Mandalorian." But back then, he wasn't confident that CGI could convincingly create a full Iron Man suit. So what better way to make it seem real than by using a real man in a real metal suit? Let's start where Tony Stark's story began: in that cave in 2008's "Iron Man." In this scene, Tony Stark is a man in a giant metal suit trying to escape a cave. To get from here to here required a decade of innovation, 10 Marvel movies, and a lot of work on movies with no superhero in sight. Animation tech has evolved in our world, the real world, to make this suit possible on the big screen, something that Marvel couldn't have dreamed of creating just 11 years earlier. Narrator: If you look at Iron Man's first suit, the Mark 1, and compare it to the hero's nanotech suit from "Avengers: Endgame," a lot has changed.īut it's not just the technology in the world of the MCU.