Alternate Realities: Unused Animatics From Iron Man 3, The Avengers Released

Here’s the thing about making movies: there isn’t a screenplay out there that doesn’t go through a half a dozen revisions and rewrites before they get locked down. Sometimes they’re not locked until after principal photography begins.

Which is all well and good for some indie flick made on a Flip Cam, but when it comes to big special effects extravaganzas, the visual effects guys can’t wait for the Suits in Corporate to get tired of giving notes like, “More edgy,” and “Can we get anyone on the planet other than Edward Norton?” They need to start planning stuff out quick, usual with animatics: little flipbook animations of the SFX sequences, done in varying degrees of detail, to give a movie storyboard of what the finished effects shots are gonna look like. And if they do an animatic for a sequence that winds up getting cut or altered? Well, that’s tough luck, Charlie; go to whatever bar Edward Norton’s drinking his sorrows away in so you can whimper to someone who gives a fuck.

But those animatics don’t just disappear… and sometimes, they make their way onto the Internet. Case in point: animator Federico D’Alessandro, who has done work on more than a dozen movies – including, most pertinent to readers of this site, every Marvel Studios movie since Thor, did a bunch of animatics of scenes from Iron Man 3 and The Avengers that didn’t make the final movie… and some of those animatics have made their way to the Web.

Now, I’ve seen plenty of animatics that are, at best, mild curiosities showing only some raw visuals. But these, however, are a little different. All of them include background music and sound effects, some of them have dialogue subtitles laid in, and all of them are just damn cool to watch, to get a sense of what we might have gotten from those two movies… including if The Wasp were part of The Avengers. And you can check them out after the jump.