I love a good VFX breakdown, especially when they’re cut with style and good pacing. This one is pretty breakneck, and yet I bet you’ll be amazed at how much detail is in those HUD displays inside Iron Man’s helmet (or at least coming through Tony Stark’s little computer headband display) that you completely missed while staring deep into Robert Downey Jr’s eyes.
And since making this kind of HUD in After Effects has been as easy as following an online tutorial for the past half-decade, this just shows another way the VFX team steps things up in Iron Man 3, among all the other crazy things they accomplished.
This is an example of the kind of detail that 95% of people will never notice, and yet your mind knows you’re seeing it. That’s part and parcel of making cutting-edge, sophisticated images and what those hundreds of millions buys. It’s the same reason there’s always those tiny little textures and details in superhero costumes. You may not notice, but your brain does.