In Disney Plus’ Ironheart series, a young genius with an uncanny knack for building armored suits finds herself plunged into a shady, criminal underworld that gives her a chance to really show off her talents. Riri Williams is not Tony Stark, and while the Iron Man films clearly informed many of Ironheart’s fantastical visuals, there’s a grounded quality to the series’ high-octane action that makes it feel unique within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
After years of seeing Iron Man and Marvel’s other high-tech superheroes running around in nanotech suits that look a bit too CGI-y for their own good, the way that Ironheart goes out of its way to show you Riri (Dominique Thorne) climbing into her homemade armor is a breath of fresh air. Even though Riri’s suit is capable of zooming through the skies and doing all kinds of acrobatic tricks, Ironheart presents it with a tactility that makes it feel almost real. Riri’s armor is supposed to look like something that actually exists in the world — which, according to cinematographer Alison Kelly (who worked on episodes 4-6), required being deeply collaborative with the entire creative team.
“Angela Barnes, our director, is amazing because she leans so heavily into the narrative,” Kelly told me in an interview. “With Ironheart, episode 5 starts, and the first third is action sequences. I feel some directors get lost in the ‘let’s do this cool action’ thing, and all of the punching, kicking, and fighting becomes a blur. But Angela really wanted to root our action in the story.”
Riri’s story takes her from MIT, where she’s expelled for breaking school rules, back to Chicago, where her suit draws the attention of magically empowered gang leader Parker Robbins (Anthony Ramos). Riri’s the perfect addition to Parker’s crew of talented misfits who have been robbing Chicago’s powerful tech startups. But when one of the team’s missions goes sideways, the blame falls on Riri, and it doesn’t take much for her new friends to decide to try killing her in a White Castle, of all places.
Kelly explained that after spending so much time focusing on what Riri can do when she’s armored up, it was important for her brawl against Parker’s gang in “Karma’s a Glitch” to emphasize that she’s just a regular person outside of the suit. Barnes also wanted the battle to unfold like a genre-shifting play, while stunt coordinator Danny Hernandez took care to lean into the reality of how someone without superpowers would fight back if they were being jumped.
“We pieced out the different beats of the White Castle fight, and Angela wanted the first part with Jeri (Zoe Terakes) and Roz (Shakira Barrera) to feel almost like a heightened ballet where you can see Riri’s panic,” Kelly said. “Then Clown (Sonia Denis) comes in, and the fight starts to feel more like a thriller where you have a beat to breathe. Then you get outside and there’s Zeke (Alden Ehrenreich) and the scene becomes a full-on Marvel super fight.”
To visualize how they could pull off some of Ironheart’s more technically complex shots involving Riri in the suit, Kelly and Barnes would get very analog. In some instances, the two would do a sort of dance around each other with Kelly holding a paperclip meant to represent the suit while Barnes would act as a camera. That was enough for them to hammer out a scene’s key camera movements, and they could then take those ideas to the VFX team headed up by Greg Steele, which could develop a series of previsualization to give everyone a sense of how the shot would come together. Steele, Kelly told me, stressed that the VFX team was more than open to notes.
“Angela would be really detailed with her notes because with previs, you can give a lot of feedback about something needing to be less shiny or something needing to be heavier and have a certain kind of clank to it,” Kelly said. “That process is such a gift because they can do so many revisions and it’s so much less expensive than trying to fix things later once they’re already done.”
When I asked Kelly if there were any special steps the creative team took to make Riri’s suit look good interacting with the real world, she told me that, for the most part, the production process is a lot like what you’d see on other VFX heavy projects. When you see Riri jumping through the air and being encased in her armor, you’re looking at a shot that’s had multiple passes of editing to add in various digital elements around a human actor. It just happens to look especially great because the VFX team, the director, and the cinematographer were able to be in constant contact with one another.
“We became really good friends on the show, and he got really on board with our aesthetic sensibilities,” Kelly said. “On some shows, you barely have a chance to talk to the VFX teamB. But this was like a love fest where we spent a lot of time hanging out in their world, they would come over to talk with us, and everyone was invested in making the show look cool.”
