Designs & Descriptions by Peter Rubin "My first shots at the shield of the house of El. Suggestions came from all over, but I had my eye on the prize from early on. You'll notice at the upper right, something very much like the one we ended with." - Peter Rubin
"Once Zack had honed in on his preferred style, we still kept pushing the boundaries, sometimes in subtle ways. This is good. It gives you confidence, once a direction is chosen but before a final call is made, that you haven't left anything important untried. The version at the upper left though, was still Zack's favorite."
"Then we started playing with 3D, and with colors… Here we were trying out a color arrangement inspired by the Max Fleischer Superman Cartoons of the 1940s. This version wasn't yet as graceful or graphically correct as it would come to be later."
"The separation between the top of the "S" and the frame was interesting but seemed both a little less alien, and a little less Superman, to me."
"This one felt a lot like the very earliest incarnations of the shield. A bit too old fashioned, maybe?"
"Once we had finalized the outlines, it was time to start thinking about structure. This "S" not only needed to be a red silhouette on a costume, but also a mechanical component (at one point there was going to be a huge door in Jor-El's house), and an ancient symbol, part of an ornate iconography. It also needed to reflect Production Designer Alex McDowell's instructions to express an Art Nouveau sensibility. I hadn't yet developed the levels here."
"Just about done. The lines are graceful and complete. One of the most important subtleties is the relative thickness of the frame at the bottom where the sides meet, compared to the top. It's a small thing, but it gives the glyph a strength, and implies size, through false perspective, and solidity. This was about the time people on the team started envisioning a poster made from the "S" alone. The one that appeared in the advertising (I didn't do it) had some minor changes, including raising the center bit that was depressed in the version you see in the movie, removing the internal filigree in the tail, and hollowing out the background field."
"I did a quick sculpt of Superman, sketchily approximaitng both Henry Cavill's looks and the movie's costume. The only purpose was to get Zack's sign-off on a size for the "S" relative to the character's chest."
In the pantheon of superheroes, Superman is the most recognized and revered character of all time. Clark Kent/Kal-El (Henry Cavill) is a young twenty-something journalist who feels alienated by powers beyond his imagination. Transported years ago to Earth from Krypton, a highly advanced, distant planet, Clark struggles with the ultimate question 'Why am I here?' Shaped by the values of his adoptive parents Martha (Diane Lane) and Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner), Clark discovers having extraordinary abilities means making difficult decisions. When the world is in dire need of stability, an even greater threat emerges. Clark must become a Man of Steel, to protect the people he loves and shine as the world’s beacon of hope – Superman.
Man Of Steel was directed by Zack Snyder, from a script written by David Goyer. The cast includes: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Russell Crowe, Ayelet Zurer, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, Michael Shannon, Antje Traue, Christopher Meloni, Harry Lennix, Laurence Fishburne and Richard Schiff. In theaters June 14th, 2013!