I all began 44 years ago, when Marvel Comics came up with the concept of the Fantastic Four. Now that Hollywood has caught up with technology, it is time to bring alive on screen comics? most famous superhero family. The comics? creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, conceived, wrote and illustrated the powers of the Fantastic Four and their arch-nemesis Dr Doom, as extensions of the characters? individual personalities.

?The biggest difference between the Fantastic Four and other comic book superheroes,? says director Tim Story, ?is that they don?t have secret identities or hidden alter egos. When they walk down the streets of Manhattan, people recognise them? They are daytime heroes, right out there in the open standing next to you and me and people these days want heroes like that. I think that kind of accessibility is one of the reasons the comic has been so popular for so many years.?

But much of the burden of that ?accessibility? fell on the shoulders of visual effects producer Kurt Williams, whose challenge was to seamlessly blend the live-action performances of the actors with the 800-plus visual effects shots in the movie. ?Tim wanted this movie and these characters to have a grounded and organic relationship to each other and their environment,? says Williams. ?So as he and the actors developed the layers of the characters, my team and I were developing the layers of visual effects that would be blended in to give the movie a very balanced, believable and photo-real look and feel. The trick was to create a set of ?physics? for each character, but not of the real world. ?Rather, they were a set of physics relative to the characters individual powers.?

?It?s really quite a clever concept,? says Ioan Gruffudd (Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic), a brilliant scientist and leader of the group. As the mother-figure, Sue Storm/Invisible Woman is, according to actress Jessica Alba, ?the glue that keeps the family together?, with the powers of invisibility and the ability to project powerful force fields.

Sue Storm?s sibling, Johnny Storm/The Human Torch, played by Chris Evans, is the third member of the fantastic family of four. Ben Grimm/The Thing is actor Michael Chiklis, in a 60-plus pounds of latex costume and prosthetic makeup that transformed him in three hours.

Catch them in action in city theatres from this Friday.