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August 18, 2013: Visual Effects of Days Past - Making Superman Fly

A production blog interview from FXPHD.com takes us behind the scenes of "Superman: The Movie" and "Superman II" with Zoran Perisic, the man who built the Zoptic front-projection system that helped make us believe a man could fly. Here's an excerpt from the very interesting (and technical) interview...

Can you take us through a typical Zoptic shot from say Superman or Superman II - such as a scene of Superman flying past Metropolis buildings?

Perisic: Non chasing Superman down the street at night was one of those shots that required Vista-Vision to Vista-Vision compositing and then Vista-Vision to 35mm anamorphic. Because helicopters were not allowed, the background plates were shot from the back of a camera car. As Superman and Non were flying just above the street lights it was difficult to keep them in the clear area between the light flares in order to maintain the illusion that they were above and behind the lights.

I got an artist to rotoscope the lights in the original background plate and produce a hi-contrast plate which had only clear circles on a black background. A sync mark was made in the camera gate before each take and at the end of the take the film was rewound in the camera; the hi-contrast plate was loaded in the projector and projected on a clear area of the f.p. screen as a superimposition. A diffusion filter in front of the camera lens made the white blobs of the hi-contrast plate flare out to match the flares of the street lights. This of course could have been done later on an optical printer but that would have involved going through another generation.

Probably the most difficult shot involved five people in the air - when the 3 bad guys fly to the North Pole taking Lois Lane and Lex Luthor with them. It involved the use of 3 pole arms on a 90 foot wide curved screen. The pole arms were rotated clockwise and anticlockwise in unison - the Zoptic Flying Rig was also rotated in the same direction cancelling out the apparent rotation effect of the pole arms and so maintaining the appearance of a straight and level flight. As a result the flyers appear to move up and down relative to each other although they are attached to fixed poles.

Read the complete interview at FXPHD.com.

Thanks to Daniel McIntosh for the link to this article.