Green Lantern: Sony suits up

We talk to several members of the Sony Pictures Imageworks team responsible for bringing many of Green Lantern’s visual effects to the screen.

As principal vendor on Green Lantern, Imageworks delivered more than 1,000 shots for the film, which sees test pilot Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) before suddenly granted superpowers from a mysterious ring and finding himself among the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps. Despite the high shot count – made up of CG suits, CG characters, environments and the deadly Parallax creature – Imageworks’ visual effects had to fit into the real world inhabited by Hal Jordan, as envisaged by director Martin Campbell.

“Martin comes from a very physically-based filmmaking school,” says Imagewor

ks visual effects supervisor Jim Berney. “A lot of this film wasn’t just trying to get a spectacle out there on the screen. The thing Martin wanted was that it had to be physically-based and look real. That posed a challenge for us because for the Green Lantern – it’s all about his energy. It’s about green effects and his constructs and environment.”

CG suits and characters

Members of the Green Lantern Corps appear in luminescent and somewhat translucent suits. Imageworks created all of the suits as entirely computer generated effects, both for fully digital characters such as Kilowog and Tomar-Re and as body replacements for Hal Jordan, Sinestro and Abin Sur. The studio referred to concepts from production designer Grant Major and lead creature designer Neville Page for the character and suit looks, as well as previs from Pixel Liberation Front (PLF) for many of the shots in the film.

“In terms of the suit,” explains Berney, “the idea was that

when somebody puts this ring on and they become

a Lantern and it incorporates into them and changes their mythology. We see Ryan Reynolds in this suit and we see depth to it. We see the muscle movement and the outer layer sliding against this inner layer. It gave us this ability to have this energy that not only crawled on the outside of the surface but also coming from within.”