VFX supervisor explains how they built their own Tony Stark for the film.
If you recall last year, star Robert Downey Jr. suffered an ankle injury on the set of Iron Man 3, stalling production for six weeks while the actor recovered, and compromising Marvel's timetable to get the movie released by May 3. With no Tony Stark in front of the camera, the studio was in a bit of a pickle...
The solution? Create a fake Robert Downey Jr. of course!
Instead of halting the film shoot completely, IM3's production team carried on. Sometimes they would shoot scenes without RDJ in them, but other times they would just create a whole new star from scratch.
"We were able to reconstruct RDJ as Tony Stark on set, with the help of [a] body double and the facial captures we'd collected afterwards," explains Iron Man 3's VFX supervisor Chris Townsend. With the help of Weta Digital, the production was able to insert Downey Jr. into key sequences of the film.
For instance, that whole beach scene at the very end? That was all shot using a body double. Following production, Weta and the production team took that raw footage and digitally merged RDJ's face onto the body. As Screen Crush notes, a similar process was used to create Chris Evans' "Skinny Steve" in Captain America.
For more VFX breakdowns on Iron Man 3, check out the full interview with Townsend on
CGSociety.
