Good morning,
It’s a rainy day today, with a forecast high temperature of only fifty degrees.
There’s an urban forestry commission meeting today at 4 p.m. I understand that ‘urban forestry’ is meant as a term of art, but its use for a small rural town will always be incongruous and affected. Like the description of our city hall as a municipal building, it’s an awkward and contrived term. Tree commission, city hall: much more simple, as ordinary language.
There will be a band concert at our high school tonight at 7 p.m. Earlier in the day, there will be a P.T.O. meeting at 3:15 p.m. at Lincoln School. It’s scheduled to take place in the LMC, following the pattern of a small town with a municipal building and an urban forestry commission. I’m not so modern and fancy as I should be. I recall a time when a room filled with books for reading or lending was called a library.
There will also be a 6:30 p.m. P.A.T.T. meeting at Washington School.
Iron Man 2 had a good weekend, with $128 million in ticket sales. I’ve not yet seen it, but I enjoyed the first film. For those curious about how the film’s designers crafted Iron Man’s suit, there’s a story at Wired entitled, Secrets of Iron Man’s New Suits.
So can you fill us in on Iron Man’s suit? What are his stats? I read that in theory, it was supposed to weigh 600 pounds. How has that changed?
The trick to these kinds of things is, you have to present it in a way that feels the part, when actually it’s quite light. The suit has to feel like it’s being made out of metal. The height of the suit is 6 foot, 5 (inches), and 600 to 800 pounds has always been the number that we kicked around with the design team.
But what about the shoulders? He looks like he has insanely broad shoulders and a tiny waist.
That’s true, that’s true. That’s the comic book proportions. That’s the trait that makes him successful. He has very broad shoulders, the smallest head possible, and very narrow hips on really long legs. It’s a really interesting body type, which is the comic-book body type.
So is Robert Downey Jr. even close to the actual measurements of the suit?
No, nobody is. The aspect of what it is, is if you were to take a formula for drawing a person, is seven heads tall. Just about anybody, proportional to their body. The comic book [formula] is eight heads tall. His suit is actually eight heads, which is to say, they took the measurement of the head and stacked them eight from the ground up, he’s eight heads tall. I think that’s partially why the suit looks as good.