In Marvel’s Black Panther, the fictional metal vibranium is a wonder material of epic
proportions.
It stores and releases large amounts of kinetic energy, and cloaks the country from outsiders.
While Vibranium doesn’t actually exist, the inspiration for its design came straight
from real scientific labs that are exploring: acoustic levitation, ferrofluids, and cymatics.
Behind this cinematic boundary between science and science fiction, is a special effects
team that makes the technology you see in these Marvel films feel like it’s right
on the cusp.
We're looking for ways to take what we already know is plausible and achievable and take
it just a little step further and have them say, “Can't wait until we have that technology.”
The work we do for feature films is really centered around designing the technology for
these characters, mainly Marvel superheroes.
We want everything to feel real, where's it going to be 5 years or 10 years, even 20 years
from now, and then incorporating that thought process into all of the designs.
Technology is so present in entertainment today that there's a lot of tropes and almost
cliches, enhance the map and glowing blue holograms everywhere.
I think the industry as a whole went through a phase where the future is cyan, and that
was great 20 years ago.
We're always trying to find a way to turn those paradigms on their head a little bit
or come up with some new unexpected solutions.
For over ten years, this VFX team’s been at the helm of title card sequences, displays,
and full technology landscapes.
Technology moves the narrative forward because so many of their characters are built on the
foundation of science.
Tony Stark is an engineer and technology genius.
Bruce Banner, scientist, physicist, doctor.
Doctor Strange was a brain surgeon.
So many of these characters come from the lab.
And the specific design that goes into a character’s technology becomes another expression of their
identity.
Marvel has this unspoken technology innovation food chain where each character's in a different
pecking order of technological coolness and sophistication.
For many years, there was no one who had better technology than Tony Stark.
He was absolutely at the highest rung of that latter.
We're very fortunate that Robert Downey Jr. is for some reason surprisingly good at holding
up a fake thing, and making motions and circling things and making it seem real.
That design was all driven by his performance, because he's doing radial moves and he's tapping.
So we know all right, we need a radial element over here because otherwise his spin is not
going to work.
So that's how that design gets created.
Nick Fury and SHIELD...when we see his tech, it's a lot more utilitarian, it's a lot more
militaristic, very purpose-driven.
Then, Black Panther and Wakanda came along, and all of a sudden that superseded Tony Stark,
and we had to go beyond his technological innovation.
I have to mention the Wakanda Bible that we were given, and that spelled so many things
out about this civilization.
We were really challenged with creating a set of rules and guidelines of what could
be plausible, what could be logical that will govern the technology throughout the film.
They're this country that has intentionally walled themselves off from the rest of the
world.
What does that technology look like if you're developing holograms, but you're not influenced
by the rest of the world's technology to develop holograms?
What would you do differently?
That movie is very much built on this innovation of the element Vibranium.
They wanted something that felt very natural like you could just dig this up out of the
ground and you would have this incredible technology.
And from those principles, then, we can start building off of that.
How does the Black Panther suit come on?
How do the Kimoyo Beads work?
How is Vibranium used as weaponry?
How is it used as transportation?
We'll have our internal brainstorming sessions, what we call this tech audit.
So we'd try and figure out what technology is working now that could snowball into this
sort of future vibranium technology.
We like to do what we call our sort of mild to wild directions.
Here's the simplest, most basic version, and here's the version that should start making
people a little bit nervous and scared.
Because we know we always end up back down sort of in the middle.
To visualize vibranium, the team poured over scientific papers and cutting edge research,
like this acoustic levitation experiment from the University of Tokyo.
That's how we got to these sand particles.
We can have sand that can morph into different shapes and do different things.
And using that idea, we developed this idea that the kimoyo beads themselves were just
really densely packed vibranium sand.
We looked at research in cymatics, and we looked at visualizing sound waves.
There's a scene in the Royal Talon in the beginning of the movie.
He's looking at this sand table, and the way it forms and the way it dissipates is with
cymatic patterns.
To get the look and feel down, the team went practical and made their very own sand table.
We wanted to build a model that we could interact with physically, and start to play with how
does sand look if it's in a car shape.
We'd put screens underneath our sand table, and show the light projecting up through the
sand and finding out what that looks like.
So we would know, if he's reaching down to pick something up, well what is he doing?
Does he have to grab it?
And if he grabs it, how does that affect the interface and the interaction?
Something that we learned early on is that if you go too far beyond what is in our current
technological climate, you will lose the audience.
They will immediately call BS.
Like, “This is bogus,” or, “Look at this just lorem ipsum type here, this ones
and zeroes that are just used as filler.”
You have to treat it as if it's real technology, and put yourself in the minds of real technologists
and making sure that everything serves a purpose. Along with tethering the fictional technology
to real science, the Black Panther filmmakers also tapped the expertise of an acoustics
expert.
So there's this science exchange run by the national academies of sciences where a list
of experts from certain fields that Hollywood can ask if they need some advice.
And my name was on this list as someone as an expert in sound.
It was quite clear that vibranium and sound had a very tight relationship.
We talked about sound as a weapon...these are things that exist now.
Those are not that far in the future.
You can use sound to acoustically cloak an object.
if we remember that sound is a wave...any time sound hits something, it bounces back.
When you hear what bounces back, you can perceive the sound is there.
If you design an object so the sound doesn't bounce back, but instead goes around it, you
can hide an object from being observed by sound.
You can make it invisible to things like sonar.
You can also design materials to not make sound.
In the scene where Shuri gives the sneakers that are silent.
She would have had to design materials on the soles that would have allowed the air
to escape between the sneaker bottom on the floor, and where the foam or whatever soft
material he was walking on, didn't make a noise itself.
Another sonic element in Wakanda’s universe?
Transportation.
It seemed that vibranium was something that could provide power quietly.
You have a train that sits on top of electromagnets, those trains are incredibly quiet because
there's no moving parts.
Now that's a real life thing.
But it would take an awful lot of technology development to transform a maglev train into
all the things that vibranium are used for in the movie.
The most useful boundary between science and science fiction is, do I believe it?
And, as someone who studies sound a lot I'm pretty sensitive to oh that can't possibly
happen.
The technology innovation that they showed in the movie was of course very hard to see
happening in the near term.
But liberties that make the story compelling are totally cool.
I think it's the way it should be done.
And sometimes, pushing the boundaries of science fiction in feature films can spur new technologies
and materials that could be in our hands one day.
It's this interesting thing we call the science fiction feedback loop, where science fiction
is created by writers or filmmakers based upon today's current technological climate.
An entire generation goes to see these films, and that triggers this inspirational drive
in innovators and inventors to want to take what we just saw and make it real.
And eventually, when technology catches up and makes that real what was once science
fiction, then it starts again; where those science fiction thinkers, filmmakers, writers
see, “Okay, so now this new technology is here.
What's the next generation of this?”
And it's this endless cycle of inspire and create, repeat.