Prologue: Iron Man 2 | extraordinary documentation of Prologue's creation of visual effects

To see the full collection of work Prologue created for Iron Man 2, head over to Prologue’s site.

For those of you who’ve seen Iron Man 2 (has anyone not seen it?), you know that Robert Downey Jr. shares the screen with Mickey Rourke and Don Cheadle for some of the film’s most intense sequences. But the real co-stars—the real palladium in Iron Man’s chest—are the ubiquitous motion design elements laced throughout the entire narrative.

From heads-up displays to preternaturally responsive real-time 3D interfaces, Tony Stark is augmented as much by stunning graphics as by his trademark power suit. Motion graphics even play a crucial role at the film’s turning point, delivering a life-saving “eureka” moment to Stark just in the nick of time.

Interface, Meet Plot

While a huge number of people and crews worked on the visual effects shots that made Iron Man the box-office smash it quickly became ($251M domestic and counting), we’re going to zero in on the epic work put forth by Prologue, who’ve shared a generous chunk of the process work behind their staggering slate of deliverables.

Not since the Minority Report have interfaces played such a major role in a Hollywood blockbuster. For Iron Man 2, Prologue lifted screen design elements off of flat surfaces and into the three dimensional world surrounding Tony Stark. As he struts through his secret lab, a virtual world of swirling data and wireframe plans pops forth from the genius playboy’s fingertips, creating a seamless dance between man and machine that elegantly echoes the symbiosis between Stark and his exoskeleton.

Process Montage

Element Discovery Sequence + Process

For the last couple decades, movies have used secret data disks and high-pressure data transfers as important plot points. (Hackers, The Net and even Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs all leap to mind against a backdrop of hundreds more.) But Iron Man 2 is the first film I can think of that actually puts the visualization of data at center stage, emphasizing not the content but the form it takes. I’m not saying it was a brilliant bit of screenwriting, but it certainly was an interesting move from the perspective of motion design in mass media.
Yeah yeah, it’s “just” fiction, but it’s edifying nonetheless. It points to the very real fact that many of the challenges facing contemporary society today can benefit from—or perhaps even by solved through—graphics. Or, more to the point, motion graphics.

Prologue’s challenge was to choreograph Downey Jr.’s finger-snapping, wrist-flicking bravura with an incredibly intricate graphical system that makes Tony Stark’s moment of realization feel like your moment of realization.

Forma: Lynette Wallworth - work I need to know about....

Lynette Wallworth

Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist whose practice spans video installation, photography and short film. In her current body of work, she specialises in the creation of immersive installation environments that offer tactile gateways. Frequently, the works are developed in series to provide a sense of a cumulative process that changes over time. The environments are not passive spaces but rely on activation by the participant/viewer. The interplay between the moving image, sound, space and visitor as component elements in the ecosystem of a work is the artist’s primary focus.

Wallworth's work is about the relationships between ourselves and nature, about how we are made up of our physical and biological environments, even as we re-make the world through our activities. The activation of the work by the viewer becomes a metaphor for our connectedness within biological, social and ecological systems. She uses technology to reveal the hidden intricacies of human immersion in the wide, complex world.

Full Biography +

Lynette Wallworth is represented by Forma Arts and Media Limited
Photography: Colin Davison, courtesy of the National Glass Centre, Sunderland, UK (R)

Past Exhibitions

Sydney Festival ›
Beautiful Sunset ›
Duality of Light ›
Evolution of Fearlessness ›
Evolution of Fearlessness ›
Invisible by Night (solo exhibition) ›
Evolution of Fearlessness (solo exhibition) ›
Hold: Vessel 1 and 2 ›
Evolution of Fearlessness ›
Invisible by Night ›
Hold: Vessel 2, 2007 ›
Lynette Wallworth | National Glass Centre, UK ›
Hold: Vessel 1, 2001 ›
Damavand Mountain ›
Evolution of Fearlessness (various works) ›
Still:Waiting2 ›

Further information for presenters of Forma projects

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