In addition, the chest piece of the Mark VII was changed from the triangle shape of the Mark VI, back to the circular shape of the Mark III. In The Avengers (2012), Saunders stated that "director Joss Whedon was looking for something that had the 'cool' factor of the suitcase suit (from Iron Man 2), while still being a fully armored, heavy duty suit that could take on an army in the final battle." To that end, Saunders borrowed ideas that had been proposed in Iron Man 2 as well as some ideas that had been abandoned in Iron Man and merged them together in a modular suit that has big ammo packets on the arms and a backpack. The Mark VI armor was designed by Granov and Saunders to be sleeker than the Mark III, while retaining many of the Mark III qualities. One specific aspect of an earlier armor was the color scheme from the Silver Centurion armor. īecause of how form-fitting the Mark V suitcase suit was required to be, the production team researched some of the classic comics armors, since they were seen as essentially variations on muscle suits. And Double Negative did an all-digital suit for the Monaco chase. But in the rest of the film, we used the CG suit entirely. staggers around tipsy, we used some of the practical suit and extended it digitally. In the house fight sequence, where Robert Downey Jr. We'd usually put in some arm pieces, but not the whole arm. So, Legacy created what we called the "football suits" from the torso up with a chest plate and helmet. For the second one, Jon was confident we could create the CG suits, and the action dictated using them. On the first Iron Man, we tried to use the Legacy and Stan Winston suits as much as we could. Snow described the process of digitally creating the suits: ILM's visual effects supervisor on the film, Ben Snow, said their work on the film was "harder" than their work on the first, stating that Favreau asked more of them this time around. įor Iron Man 2 (2010), ILM again did the majority of the effects, as it did on the first film. To help with animating the more refined suits, information was sometimes captured by having Downey wear only the helmet, sleeves and chest of the costume over a motion capture suit. The Orphanage and The Embassy did additional work. Saunders streamlined Granov's concept art, making it stealthier and less cartoonish in its proportions, and also designed the War Machine armor, but it was "cut from the script about halfway through pre-production." He explained that the War Machine armor "was going to be called the Mark IV armor and would have had weaponized swap-out parts that would be worn over the original Mark III armor," and that it "would have been worn by Tony Stark in the final battle sequence." Concerned with the transition between the computer-generated and practical costumes, Favreau hired Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) to create the bulk of the visual effects for the film after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) and Transformers (2007). Granov's designs were the primary inspiration for the film's, and he came on board the film after he recognized his work on Jon Favreau's MySpace page. Iron Man comic book artist Adi Granov designed the Mark III with illustrator Phil Saunders. The Mark II resembles an airplane prototype, with visible flaps. A scale model was used for the shots of it being built. The animatronic required five operators for the arm, and was built on a gimbal to simulate walking. Stan Winston Studios built a 10-foot (3.0 m), 800-pound (360 kg) animatronic version of the Iron Monger suit. A single 90-pound (41 kg) version was built and was designed to only have its top half worn at times. It also foreshadows the design of Obadiah Stane's Iron Monger armor. The Mark I design was intended to look like it was built from spare parts: particularly, the back is less armored than the front, as Tony Stark would use his resources to make a forward attack. Stan Winston and his company were hired to build metal and rubber versions of the armors. Iron Man (2008) director Jon Favreau wanted the film to be believable by showing the eventual construction of the Mark III suit in its three stages.
The Hall of Armor display at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con, featuring the Marks I-VII (back) and Mark XLII (front)