There's a whole new design language

for Superman (played by Henry Cavill) in Man of Steel. Gone are the magical crystals from the previous movies on his home planet Krypton, replaced by a more dynamic physics. Kryptonite, his Achilles' heel on Earth, has been replaced by confusion and self-doubt. Is he Kal-El or Clark Kent? Will humans accept him or reject him?

It's all part of a narrative strategy to ground the 75-year-old DC superhero in a more relatable reality for the 21st century—work that fell to production designer Alex McDowell (Fight Club, Minority Report, Watchmen), who's also an associate professor at the University of Southern California and cofounder of the 5D Institute for immersive design in transmedia, and who has been on the cutting edge of a more progressive approach involving digital world-building.

Superman's Home World

For Man of Steel, McDowell worked closely with director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David Goyer—and art departments in L.A., Chicago, and Vancouver—in devising the elaborate rules of Superman's world. Snyder even had a virtual camera set up in his garage to work with the in-house previsualization team so that every detail would be just right.

"The tech of Krypton's backstory became an important part of driving the design," he says, "And the way the strands of narrative evolved, there were a lot of parallels between Krypton and Earth, just as there were when Superman became popular during World War II as a metaphor for fighting fascism."

"We used feudal Japan as a model, and one of the rules we came up with was that they shut down science and technology on Krypton, abandoned space exploration, and turned inward," McDowell says. "At the point where we enter the movie, Superman's father, Jor-El [Russell Crowe], tracks the damage on the planet as chief scientist and predicts that it will end in tears and no one's paying attention. The way we built the planet is that they've strip-mined the surface to the point where it's scarred all over. And the cities have moved underground."

No Straight Lines

The design language of Man of Steel's Krypton grew of the idea that its people could modify the world on a molecular level, leading to a symbiosis between the mechanical and biological. "So they grow their objects, they grow their spaceships, and they grow their buildings in a 3D printing way so it's a controlled biomorphic architecture," McDowell says. "They also developed biomechanical creatures, including beasts and robotic servants. Jor-El flies on a giant creature that's a cross between a dragon and an insect with a carapace exterior."

One of the outgrowths of this organic philosophy is that they never invented the straight line on Krypton. The architecture is based on curved or spiral shapes made out of hard-shell materials that behave like metal or stone but look iridescent and shiny. The key inspiration was the photography of Karl Blossfeldt, best known for his close-up shots of plants at high magnification. So there's a proliferation of Fibonacci spirals, including the dwellings and the pod ship that carries Kal-El to Earth.

There was one unforeseen complication: When trying to model the interior of the house of El, which is like a giant snail shell, the moviemakers couldn't find a digital design program that was capable of building such a convoluted shape. They had to create sculptural curves that all lined up beautifully in virtual space and hired a sculptor who carved the shapes in foam, which were then scanned back into the computer.

"Mostly what we were doing that made it possible to do this Krypton form language is that we were pushing 3D models out to rapid prototyping," McDowell recalls. "We had every 3D printer ... tied up for about three months just carving or printing full-scale parts for the sets."

This included human-scale sleep bays, doorways, and other exotic forms that were built directly from digital models. But for the really large organic architectural shapes, they prototyped slices of ribbing that were combined with strips of wood constructed by a team trained as boatbuilders, then covered with concrete.

"It's one of those spaces I really like where you've got one foot in the 14th century and one in the 21st century, so the forms themselves are being driven by the computer but the construction methodology is completely traditional," McDowell says.

Stand-Ins

Vancouver doubled for Metropolis in Man of Steel. The Daily Planet, where Clark Kent works with girlfriend Lois Lane (Amy Adams), is under siege by the current publishing crisis and has the look of a '70s modern-style steel and glass structure. The interior was inspired by the Los Angeles Times newsroom.

Meanwhile Plano, Ill., located just outside Chicago, doubles for Smallville, the rural throwback where Clark Kent grows up and is in the throes of bankruptcy, foreclosure, and unemployment. Plano made a particularly good choice because its layout allowed the producers to stage one of the movie's biggest action sequences there.

"Plano's a one-sided town, with the other side being the railway track," McDowell says. "We built the other side so we could blow it up [during Zod's attack]. And we blocked one road, which is a T-junction into the main street, and filled it with the façade of a Walmart. We built a full-scale train and pushed it right into the middle of the store."

Language

At one point Snyder wanted to create a whole Kryptonian language, so McDowell hired anthropology professor Christine Schreyer, who teaches fantasy languages such as Klingon and Na'vi at the University of British Columbia. She constructed a graphical language built around objects instead of personal pronouns, and with the help of Goyer, the filmmakers incorporated words from the Superman canon.

"It's real and has meaning and can be translated," McDowell says. "We imagined that 'S' is hope and the glyph for the House of El. It's the equivalent of a coat of arms. You see it emblazoned everywhere. It's carved on spaceships, on weaponry, and on the outside of robots."

CG or Not CG

Despite the need for fancy effects, Snyder prefers shooting as much in camera as possible. So Man of Steel was a sophisticated hybrid (utilizing both Weta Digital and Weta Workshop), in which the director was the mediator in deciding what to shoot in reality and what to make CG.

"I think of him saving people on the oil rig," McDowell says. "That was a full 360-degree set built in a parking lot in Vancouver laced with practical effects, but it was steel so you could set the whole thing on fire and then reset.

"I've yet to be on a film that is set up in the way I would imagine that [James] Cameron and [Peter] Jackson are doing," McDowell says, referring to fully digital creations such as Avatar and The Hobbit. "But we learn a great deal every film, and I was happy that we got a really holistic art department working and we produced enormous amounts of visual information and designed the landscapes of all the postproduction components that would not have been done in the old days."

Bill Desowitz is the owner of the Immersed in Movies blog.

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