[theatrical music]
- I'm John DJ Des Jardin, visual effects supervisor
for Zack Snyder's "Justice League".
I'm gonna try to talk about
every major superpower on the movie.
[mechanical arm blasting]
[theatrical music]
First up, we're gonna talk about Superman.
Heat vision is kinda like something in between
a flamethrower and a laser, right?
It has a certain character to the edge of it
which is a little bit like a jagged flame-y kind of thing
that has a direction to it and a frequency to it.
When we were working on "Man of Steel",
we made sure there was a difference
between Superman's heat vision and Zod.
Superman probably doesn't feel that much pain anyway,
but it shouldn't look like the easiest thing to do.
That's why he doesn't do it all the time.
We don't even know if he can see when he does it,
but that's why it's always like he does it
and then it's kinda like, "Ah."
He turns it off and it's like, "Okay, where are we?"
In "Man of Steel", when he's a little kid,
that's when he first gets it.
We didn't want it to ever have a fall off really,
because a lot of times, in the other movies,
even the Richard Donner movie,
it's always kind of weird
because it's like a little spotlight on something.
It's like, "Here's the inside of a safe,
"Here's the inside of this box", or something,
and we just figured it was one of those nightmarish powers
where if you turn it on, you see everything like that,
and that was how we did that.
We shoot a play,
we always survey everything, we always LiDAR everything,
we always do an extensive Enviro Cam or texture shoot
and hand that over to, in this case it was Scanline
that ended up doing that.
And yeah, it was them just looking
at everything in the scene
and getting all the insides modeled out
and bring it out to various degrees in the composite.
[theatrical music]
Zack had this really interesting rule or thing that he did.
When he first flies,
he's doing these super jumps in "Man of Steel".
He faces the sun and realizes that this is something
that comes from inside him, and he kneels down
and you see the snow start to go around,
and there is a bit of that in "Justice League".
When he puts on the black suit, he comes out,
you see him kneel down and the debris and stuff starts going
and then he just goes.
And Zack would say, "I kinda wanna put some float into him."
Do we hang him from wires?
Do we put him on a belly pan?
Do we put him in a tuning fork?
Short answer is, we did all of those things.
We knew what we could do to have him take off
from just standing there and become CG.
All Henry Cavill had to do
was make a move like, "I'm going."
I think our philosophy never really changed
from "Man of Steel"
when it came to Superman's super strength.
He can really wield that stuff around
as quickly as he wants,
and so any time he had to pick up anything,
it was usually some kind of green foam, lightweight buck
that we used to get his handholds right.
I think it was in "BVS" where he picks up
part of a spacecraft, same kind of thing.
All these characters have some kind of super strength,
but they have slight differences,
and so there were a lot of conversations
about who do we think is stronger?
Is it Wonder Woman or is it Superman?
I think Superman probably with raw brute strength
is stronger than she is, but remember, she is magical.
Now I'm gonna talk about Wonder Woman's powers.
In our version, it only lights up
when it encircles an organic or a living thing.
Really evident in Zack's "Justice League",
where she actually lassos a catwalk as she shoots out
after the parademons, just to kind of change her trajectory
and help her land on the catwalk, but it doesn't light up
'cause it's an inorganic structure.
We have a lot of experience with LEDs
and we all worked on "Watchmen" together,
so Dr Manhattan LED suit, we knew that,
"Okay, let's get a strip of LEDs
"that we can put into a rope."
The first thing that happened with that
was it broke all the time, so we realized,
we only use it to light her up
or light the person up that it's surrounding.
Anything in between doesn't matter,
so we put bungees in the middle.
That kept it from breaking so much.
But that's kind of how we did that.
So the funny thing about that is,
we always called it the Boosh.
That's what we called it.
Zack and Michael Wilkinson designed them.
They're not bracelets, they're gauntlets
because she's a warrior.
It's like, that's what you have.
We decided that she's got to fight,
she's got to fight against Doomsday and all this stuff,
so we need something that she can do,
and that's where that came from.
It literally came from the necessity of the fight,
and we all love the Boosh.
Next up, Flash.
- I can't maintain this!
- Trying to dissect how to do Flash was, I think,
one of our more interesting problems on the movie.
We had a couple rules for all this kind of fast travel.
One main rule with Flash
was we don't ever wanna see him run like this.
We don't ever wanna see that.
So that's why, almost like "Six Million Dollar Man",
the faster he runs, it's almost like the slower he gets.
You see him rev up in slow motion
with the slow motion lightning, and then boom, he's gone.
If you see him in real time, you can't even see him run.
He's just gone.
- They really just vanished, huh?
Oh, that's rude.
- And then when you start running with him,
he may look fairly normal
but it's generally 48 frames a second,
but the exterior's whipping by, right?
We always pretended like we're trying to photograph him,
but we can never pick the right frame rate
to really get him.
So yeah, he starts to really almost fly.
In the junction rescue scene
where Barry Allen is rescuing Iris from this car accident,
we came up with a couple of rules.
One was if everything else in the world,
when you're in Flash time with him,
looks like it's in 600 frames per second or more,
Barry Allen's able to move at a different frame rate
but not quite 24 frames per second normal.
We usually shot him at 48 frames per second,
just to give him a little float.
We knew, "We have to get into a green screen stage
"and start doing everything from there."
We were like, "Okay, we need to make that environment in CG,
"we need to make the crash in CG,
"and Kiersey's gonna have to be on some kind of rig
"to float her that's pretty controllable,
"and she's gonna have to act frozen.
"If she moves, we're gonna have to stabilize her in post."
And so, if you look at the footage, it's pretty interesting
because first, she's in a costume
on a Kuka Arm motion control rig being floated up
while Ezra looks up at her.
You pull her hair back and then you make CG hair
that can dovetail into the real hairline
and make it float the way you need it to float.
And as Ezra looks like he was just about to touch her,
she would start to roll and he would just kind of pretend
to guide her down without touching her too much.
This is another rule with The Flash,
you can't grab someone and save them
until she's on the ground,
and her clothes kinda get flowy and her hair gets flowy.
And then, once she's down on the ground,
then we kinda go into real time.
The time travel was always a part of the end of the movie.
Everyone in the Justice League has a particular thing
they have to do in the fight at the end.
Flash's main job is to build up a charge
and give it to Cyborg to be able to do what he needs to do.
- I can conduct a significant electrical current.
I might be able to wake the box.
- But weird things happen
as I get close to the speed of light.
The time travel thing is fun because Zack was very clear
he wanted the mother boxes to merge.
The effect would essentially erase the planet,
just erase everything, and he wanted it to be a void,
like just a void with a quasar at the origin,
and it would become very beautifully cosmic,
and the origin of that would come
with each of Flash's footsteps.
He said, "I want a big bang to come out of each footstep"
and that starts to repopulate the void,
which when you look behind him,
you realize he's actually like a tidal wave, pulling,
and you have to remember how much time
he's actually pulling,
six seconds of time back is what he's doing.
It's not much, but it's huge.
It's the hugest thing ever.
[uptempo rock music]
We all know Batman's power is he's rich.
- What are your super powers again?
- I'm rich.
- And he has a lot of gadgets.
Our version of Batman and the gadgets
is probably a little bit different.
Zack really wanted to model our Batman
on Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns".
The Batmobile is still beefy
and it's got some bat properties to it.
He's got the grapple gun, which he uses in different ways.
In "Justice League", we extend the powers a little bit,
or the gadgets a little bit so that he has a gauntlet.
You can see Alfred shooting one of the Kryptonian guns,
which I thought was pretty fun
because we kept those from "Man of Steel".
Same effect and everything.
While we see it get used to absorb parademon gunfire,
ultimately it's gonna save his life
in his rematch against Superman, I guess,
in the park battle.
- Permission to come aboard?
- Aquaman, whose strength, we think, comes from the fact
that he can withstand crazy underwater pressures
that no human being can.
He's half human, half Atlantean,
so he can breathe underwater and he is really strong
from being able to be underwater.
Some kind of hydrokinesis.
That trident is a way for him to channel his hydrokinesis,
so that's what he's doing
when he tries to hold the water back.
He just can't do it indefinitely.
And I would also think too that the hydrokinesis
is the other thing that helps he and other Atlanteans
swim underwater.
Even when you look at the first time you see him in "BVS",
when he kinda attacks the underwater camera
and then speeds off, he's just flying underwater.
That's what we think they do.
We think that they manipulate
some kind of underwater slip stream.
We had some really early conversations where Zack's like,
"I don't think Atlanteans can talk underwater",
and so that's where that air bubble rule came from.
We figured if they have hydrokinesis,
they can open up an air bubble
if they wanna have a long conversation.
- I like it, it's quiet.
[theatrical music]
Next up, Cyborg.
I think maybe his biggest power is manipulation of data
and his control over the virtual world.
He can fly and he has certain weapons
that can come out of his body.
I feel like we don't really know what all of those are,
but we try to represent the most popular ones,
especially with the sonic cannon.
- Relax Alfred, I'll take it from here.
- Put Ray in a performance capture outfit,
make sure he's got all the interactive
light elements that we need.
So he's got an eye that's gonna light up his face
and anybody close to him.
He's got a chest piece that represents
the energy in his chest.
It's gonna light him up here.
It's gonna light up anybody standing close,
like when he talks to Diana and so forth.
That's it.
He basically lived with that for months.
[theatrical music]
Steppenwolf.
This was a big ticket item.
He's a space faring being, so he can jump a lot, I guess.
I guess maybe Earth's gravity is nothing for him,
so he can jump around very freely.
He doesn't fly, but he does have the Electro-Axe.
These characters are all based
on Jack Kirby's Fourth World characters,
which are just LSD, psychedelic, trippy as hell.
You gotta have an Electro-Axe.
We wanted him to use it.
It's got lightning to it.
It's pretty R rated in this version.
He does hack people to pieces.
Yeah, that's Steppenwolf.
It was always adaptive armor,
which is why it has all the little, we call them blades.
It's made of all these little blades,
and they all needed to animate.
And you can almost call it mood armor in some ways.
When it's docile, it kinda looks kind of low-key,
although it has a little flutter to it.
And then when he's mad, it's super spiky,
which is kinda fun.
But we always loved it, we always loved it.
And Ciaran Hinds played Steppenwolf,
he had a performance capture suit on
and the Electro-Axe was, I don't think it was,
it must have been a scaled version for him
and it had a bunch of LEDs along the blade area,
which is where most of the energy would come from.
Like that scene where he comes down on Superman,
Henry could stand here
and it would glow and light him correctly.
So we were really happy to finally be able to execute it.
I'm real happy with it in the movie.
Omega Beam kills Vulko, and it was our one moment to do it
because we always wanted to do the Omega Beams.
The Omega Beams, again, Jack Kirby Fourth World,
trippy LSD stuff.
So that was fun, yeah.
Jaggy beams, jaggy beams.
[theatrical music]
Green Lantern Power Ring.
He's an ancient Green Lantern.
15 thousand, 20 thousand years ago.
We wanted his power to be raw, not have a construct to it.
Beams, beams are cool.
Martian Manhunter.
- I'll be in touch.
- Martian Manhunter shape shifting.
A whole conversation with Zack,
I always thought it would be cool
for him to put in the scene where he's Martha.
Really hard to do because we couldn't do any kind of capture
on anybody to do this.
We did shoot Harry Lennox remotely 'cause it was COVID,
it is COVID times and it was COVID times.
We had video of his face delivering these lines
that Zack had for him, but the entire creation
was done remotely from home
and animated by a very good team of animators at Scanline.
Martian Manhunter, we always love him.
By the way, he's one of the mainstays of Justice League,
so we wanted to really bring him into it
by the end of the movie.
[theatrical music]
So I think that's every major superpower
in Zack Snyder's "Justice League",
but I probably left something out so I apologize.
We ended up doing something on 2700 shots
in about seven months, and again,
it wasn't actually the execution of the work.
The simplest shots were the ones to start from scratch.
The hardest ones were everything else
where something had been done to varying degrees.
When I'm working with Zack, I always do a director's cut.
Every time.