Bringing the FF to Life on Screen
What does it take to bring the Fantastic Four's out of this world adventures to movie screens?
Fantastic Four movie special effects supervisor Kurt Williams told Comics Continuum it's a "pretty daunting task" to accurately capture the comic book FF on film.
"I thought long and hard before I jumped in on this movie," Williams said. "Because it really is one of the more challenging Marvel comics. It's not that you have two characters, but in this movie we have five characters to bring off the Marvel page into a live-action film and try to make believe them."
Williams said his job was to give Tim Story the tools he needed to bring the comic book story to film.
"Despite all the technology hurdles to be overcome, I needed to give him a skillset with each character that could develop throughout the movie and relate to the characters' emotions and things like," Williams said, "that will allow us to develop the characters from the first time their hit with the cosmic rays to the end of the movie as they become the Fantastic Four, as they develp their powers and refine them.
"Obviously, the very first thing we did was go back to the comic book. And our job was to find images in the comic book that could translate to a live-action, photo-real. So we went to great lengths to find through all of the Marvel work, with the help of Marvel's Kevin Feige and Avi (Arad), to come up with the types of images they wanted to see as these characters develop."
Williams noted that some of the Marvel poses and comic-book action don't always translate well into a live-action movie.
"One of our edicts, one of the things we think about every time we work on a shot is, is that character organic?" Williams said. "Does it have attributes from our world that have true physics to it?"