A range of techniques were combined to make Superman fly. An excerpt from issue #41 of befores & afters magazine.
Among the many kinds of scenes in Superman to solve was how to depict Superman (David Corenswet) in flight. Stephane Ceretti says that the director and several heads of department got involved for this discussion. “James was involved. Our DP Henry Braham was involved, as well as our stunt coordinator Wayne Dalglish. James kept talking about Top Gun: Maverick and the way they shot everything. Obviously we’re not filming a plane, but it was more about the style and the dynamism of it and the feeling of being with Superman all the time and feeling the speed. We started talking about, how does he fly, how does he move, how do we film it, how do we film it when it’s a fight, and how do we film it when it’s just him flying from one place to another?”
“Also,” continues Ceretti, “it was about, how do we express the urgency of the moment or the non-urgency of the moment. In fight scenes, we’re much more active with the camera. There’s much more camera motion around him on scenes where, for example, when he comes back from Metropolis and he flies back to the Fortress and is trying to figure out what happened to Krypto. It’s a moment that is very stressful for Superman, so it’s much more shaky and energetic and messy as he is going through a lot of wind and weather and clouds. So, depending on the moment we were trying to modulate how we film it to just express the moment, rather than covering flying just the same way in every sequence.”
Making Supes fly, crafting Krypto and Guassian Splat capture
Those conversations resulted in the use of first-person view (FPV) drones, including the deployment of them inside sound stages and on location. The idea was to heighten the motion to something further than what might typically be done on a sound stage with large camera cranes. Notes Ceretti: “We flew these FPV drones inside our largest stage at Trilith Studios, mostly for the first battle between Superman and the Hammer of Boravia. We would fly these little drones around him, going all the way from the edge of the stage towards him. We’d film either in front of a bluescreen or using an LED volume.”
Earlier, production had filmed plates in Svalbard, Norway, located just 800 miles from the North Pole, for scenes of Superman near his Antarctica-based Fortress of Solitude. “The same drone team was there with their FPV drones that they could really fly and spin and everything,” says Ceretti. “Henry also went around the island and shot a lot of plates that we would use later.”
This later usage became background and reference plates for scenes of Superman flying over a snowy landscape to his Fortress of Solitude. They were also utilized for playback on the Trilith LED volume stage known as Lux Stage Atlanta, powered by Sweetwater Film and Entertainment. Here, Corenswet would be filmed in a multitude of ways, including on a tuning fork-like rig in front of the LED screen which was playing back the drone footage. He could be turned, spun around and moved up and down. “For me,” discusses Ceretti, “it was about trying to recreate what they did for the 1978 Richard Donner movie, but in a modern way. Back then, they did some of it with rear and front projection with these 3M screens with a technique that they had invented back then called the Zoptic process, invented by Zoran Perisic.”
In coming up with ways to realize the flying scenes, Ceretti almost inadvertently arrived at some of Superman’s dramatic flying moments over the snowy landscape after developing a fun ritual on set involving PEZ dispensers. “It was kind of a secret, but I was putting these PEZ dispensers on James’ video village monitors, every day. We were adding more and more and more of them and then other toys, too. I had a Superman PEZ dispenser and I was playing back the flying plates for Superman, holding it up to the screen. I said, ‘Oh, we could do this with this plate and then spin around.’ And that became the opening scene when he flies and goes through that crevice. That became the viz for that shot. We called it PEZVIZ!”
Ultimately, shooting in that LED volume became highly useful for lighting interaction, rather than utilizing the footage specifically as ‘in-camera VFX’, as Ceretti explains. “There was no expectation that we would just use that straight out of the box. We wanted to add snow and wind and atmosphere, which we couldn’t really do there. It was good for timing the action to the plate and framing it to the plate and then timing all the rotations, especially that very precise moment when he spins through the crevice. We wanted to make sure we had the right timing for that.”
Getting the right light interaction onto David was a key goal. “Most of the time you don’t really use a volume for exterior shots except when it’s slightly overcast, and these plates were kind of overcast,” outlines Ceretti. “There was no real strong light, so that was perfect for this. It was a lot of bounce from the snow and the sky was behind some clouds. It was also great for David. I mean, imagine you’re him and you’re there looking at this footage and feeling like you’re flying—you see all that right in front of you. I think that really added a lot to his feeling of flying and making for something that’s more believable.”
Flying, of course, included taking off and landing. For some of those moments, Corenswet was lifted or lowered with the aid of wire work. Then, flying shots tended to include transitions from real to digital double versions of Superman, either to extend the motion or complete motions that Corenswet could not do for real.
Scans of Corenswet orchestrated by Clear Angle Studios were provided to the main vendors Industrial Light & Magic, Wētā FX and Framestore (with ILM taking the lead on the Superman asset, which was shared between facilities). Specific facial capture of the actor was also carried out. One particular challenge became hair. “James was trying to push these shots to have a real feeling of air and wind, to feel the power of the wind for the speed at which Superman flies. We couldn’t really have wind in the face of the actor that would be strong enough to give us the right hair motion and not completely blow into the face of the actors. I mean, David would be just blinking with his eyes constantly. So we ended up doing a lot of CG hair for when he’s flying. We shot David with a bald cap for many of those shots.”
And then there was Superman’s cape. In general, Corenswet performed flying scenes without the cape, which was added digitally. Says Ceretti: “We did a lot of work on the cape to get the feeling of the vibration of the cape right. Our simulations were sometimes intra-frame and in-between frames so that you could feel the high frequency vibration of the tip of the cape and really understand the power of the wind when you fly at that speed.”
A final element to the flying scenes was the manner in which Braham lensed them. The cinematographer employed a Leica Tri-Elmar lens on a RED V-Raptor, allowing for a seamless shift between three wide focal lengths (16mm, 18mm and 21mm). “He could change the actual lens on the lens itself,” outlines Ceretti. “It’s a cool little gadget that’s making our job in VFX much harder because it’s really hard to understand the distortions on that lens. It’s very distorted, but very interesting. Henry and James really liked to use the Stabileye Nano rig, and the compact RED cameras mean we can get really close to the actors. Even though the lens creates something that’s a little unusual, especially that close to Superman, I think it just creates a feeling of you being there with him. You’re so close to the action and you’re seeing his face and you are feeling it as an audience.”
