‘THE BATMAN’

Visual effects supervisor Dan Lemmon says Matt Reeves and company wanted to make “The Batman” “not so much a superhero movie, but a gritty, noir detective story, grounded in reality.”

To make an unreal place — Gotham City — and unlikely abilities — such as Batman gliding to safety after jumping off a skyscraper — seem viable, the team used LED volumes — soundstages with massive video screens. They shot the actors against virtual Gotham cityscapes projected onto the screens, rather than green screens. Thus, instead of regular movie lighting, the actors were illuminated by the virtual sunset and city ambience.

Lemmon says, “You can see the sunset reflecting off Batman’s cowl, Selina Kyle’s outfit. Sunsets have a lot of different colors; you see that on their costumes — oranges and blues reflecting off everything, off the puddles on the ground.”

An LED volume also helped Batman escape from police headquarters.

“Matt’s mandate in the wing-suit sequence was, ‘I want people to think Robert Pattinson actually jumped off a building and landed without a parachute.’

“We watched action-sports videos, YouTube-Red Bull stuff. He wanted to emulate that style of photography — they’d have cameras mounted to their bodies. He felt that gave a sense of a real action video rather than a contrived piece of cinema,” Lemmon says.

“We built a wind tunnel out of LED panels. We hung both the professional wing-suit performer and Rob Pattinson on safety cables to keep them suspended in the wind tunnel and forced a lot of air across the suit. That gave it more of a sense of realism.”