One of the most complex technical accomplishments in Spider-Man™ 3 is one most audiences aren’t even aware of – for the first time, Peter Parker fights using his superhero powers but not in his Spider-Man suit. That was an incredible challenge, since having Tobey Maguire’s face visible required an exceptional blending of CG and live footage in the same shot. But it also meant showing more of the actors’ performances, capturing more of the reality.

Here's what Scott Stokdyk had to say about it.

Scott Stokdyk - Visual Effects Supervisor

Scott said the most spectacular scenes in Spider-Man 3 preserved as much of the actor’s performance as possible, using digital doubles to fill in the rest.

It was important to Sam – and to me too – that we incorporate as much live action into the animation as possible. If anybody is sitting in the audience marveling at the visual effects, that means we’ve taken them out of the movie. The reason a shot is animated is because a real person can’t do it. The trick is to find the balance between making it cinematic and exciting and making it real.

We hadn’t had to build a complete Peter Parker digital actor for the previous films. On the first Spider-Man we saw a little bit of Tobey’s face inside the homemade costume for two shots; and on Spider-Man™ 2, we had a shot of Spider-Man in the costume, but with the mask off, seeing a little of Tobey’s face. That was a hybrid of our classic Spidey, with Peter Parker’s head on it. But we never had to do a full street-clothes version of Peter digitally, with cloth and hair and skin on his hands and arms.

We worked more closely with the stunt team than on the last two movies. We used motion control cameras, and at times virtually motion controlled the stunt people! We used more computer controlled wire work with the actors than ever before, and we chose the best of each of those pieces and blended them together. We tried to find more opportunities to blend from real actors to CG, and back to real again… even in the same shot!

The very first shot in principal photography on Spider-Man 3 is a good example of how this approach worked. We were on Stage 30 at Sony Pictures Studios [in Culver City, California], which was appropriate, since that’s where the final scenes of Spider-Man™ 2 – Doc Ock on the pier – were shot. Anyway, the scene is when Peter Parker gets ambushed by his friend, Harry Osborn, who is now the New Goblin.

Tobey Maguire and James Franco did a lot of wire work – both of them were suspended midair using harnesses – to get as much of the aerial battle on film as it was safe to do. That got us a lot of their performance and facial expressions to work with. Then we layered in the buildings and the alley with elements from the stunt performers’ work and the CG characters.

James was really great at working with this Sky Stick on the bluescreen stage, too. Sometimes, he was better at it than the stunt people. There were times where we thought we would use a stunt person, because it was a wide shot, for example, and the character would be fairly small in frame; but the body language and the motion were so much better with James Franco, we ended up using him, even in those wide shots.

The Subway sequence is another good example of our approach. There’s the fight scene where Spider-Man pushes Sandman’s face against the speeding subway train, which was a mix of practical and special effects. We had film of Thomas Haden Church having his face smashed into a plane of plexiglass. That gave us the real lighting on Thomas Haden Church as well as the real physical effect on his body. In post, we inserted our CG train, tracked his head, and did a CG erosion effect on it, with CG particles flying off. The shot of Sandman’s head being shaved off is one of my favorite shots in the movie.

That scene ends after Sandman gets knocked around by the water gushing from a burst water main and dissolves down the drain. John Frazier [head of special effects] set up the initial shot of Thomas on Sony’s water tank stage. He used 50,000 gallons of water blasting fifty feet out from a pipe against the rear of the set. We covered the scene using eight cameras to get it from all angles.

Beyond that, to get the most accuracy possible for the digital doubles, we used the system from Spider-Man™ 2 based on Paul Debevec’s LightStage technology. It basically photographs an actor’s face from different angles under many lighting conditions, which are processed and mapped onto a CG head.

We also gathered even more live-action reference during the shoot than we had on the last two films. We wanted to know, on a per-shot basis, exactly what the real character looked like in any given environment; and then we did everything we could to replicate that in our CG character.

For most of the classic Spider-Man CG we were able to use the model digital artist Koji Morihiro had built for the first Spider-Man. That it held up, seven years later, is really amazing. Its musculature, skinning and surfacing properties were all the same. We have better tools now, of course; but Koji did such a fantastic job with that original model that it still looked great after all that time.

We'll find out what Spencer Cook thought about using digital doubles.  Stay tuned!

Scott Stokdyk and Spencer Cook have different perspectives on creating Sandman, but they agree that the experience and the creature are unique.  Here's what Scott had to say. 

Scott Stokdyk - Visual Effects Supervisor

Scott shares his perspective on Sandman:

We are used to seeing sand castles being kicked down, seeing sand flow, going to the beach and stepping in sand, but that’s all the reverse of what we do on screen. The requirements of what our sand had to do forced Imageworks to form a team that wrote powerful new software, built on top of existing software and tools.  We had to create things to have control over particles and character animation. It was both a technical and artistic challenge to be extraordinary yet believable and rooted in the real world.

Flint Marko dissolves from human into sand, then forces himself back into human form by sheer strength of will. The Imageworks crew had our HD witness cameras at different angles on the set – the big bowl where the scene’s physics experiment takes place was built on a sound stage at Sony Pictures. Based on that, we generated 3D layers for erosion of the body and particles flying off the body. Then turning Thomas Haden Church into sand was done by precisely lining up the actor to a 3D digital version of him – a technique called rotomating – then painstakingly shedding particles off of Thomas tiny piece by tiny piece.

Other scenes usually used a similar combination of digital with live Thomas. One of my favorite shots is Sandman’s head getting shaved off by the subway train, for instance. We started with a live basis, film of Thomas Haden Church having his head pushed against a vibrating plexiglass sheet. That gave us the real lighting as well as the real physical effect on his body. In post, we inserted our CG train, tracked his head, and did a CG erosion effect on it, with CG particles flying off.

Overall, getting the sand to behave in a convincing way was difficult. Sand is made up of millions of solid bits, but sometimes it acts like a liquid – picture a sand dune being blown by the wind. We studied falling sand, blowing sand, sliding sand, spraying sand, and that ended up with everyone at Imageworks using our own combination of particle effects and simulation engines for rigid bodies, fluids and gas, and we worked closely with the animators. It was equal parts cutting-edge technology and incredible artistry.

Check out the video below from The Making of Sandman.

For more info on everything Spidey check out www.sony.com/spider-man.

We'll find out next week from Spencer Cook on his thoughts on the creation of Sandman.  Stay tuned!!!

Thanks for reading everyone!  

Dear Friends,

As I’m sure you are aware, the October 30^th DVD/Blu-ray release of “Spider-Man 3” is tomorrow!  With the days on the calendar flying by, I wanted to take a quick moment in order to give you my personal highlights of the release. 

First off, and it’s a big one, is the release of not only “Spider-Man 3” on Blu-ray, but “Spider-Man” and “Spider-Man 2” as well.  A couple weeks ago I had the privilege of seeing a Blu-ray demonstration in which the three Spider-Man films were featured.  Being in Spidey 3 world these past two-and-a-half years, I really hadn’t had the opportunity to get educated regarding the benefits of Blu-ray, but the presentation really opened my eyes and I was impressed by the degree to which Blu-ray advances the experience.   The picture quality, with the extra disc space available via Blu-ray, was as impressive as it gets and Sam Raimi and editor Bob Murawski’s painstaking transfers of all three movies is readily apparent.

In terms of content, I’m extremely excited about the featurettes found on disc two.  We’ve had informative and entertaining featurettes in the past, but what sets the current crop apart from the other presentations are the materials that were captured on and off the set.  Off the set, we invited Vic Davis, our EPK producer, and his crew to numerous pre-production meetings.  On the set, for the first time we made Vic and his team members of our crew.  While filming “Spider-Man” and “Spider-Man 2”, Vic or his counterparts would have to call me and ask permission to shoot on a particular day.  Not so on “Spider-Man 3”.  Vic and company were issued ID badges and given carte blanche.  Whatever they needed to film, within reason, they were given access to.  The result is a gallery of featurettes that really pull back the curtain on the making of “Spider-Man 3” and in turn gives the viewer a front row seat to the pre-production, production and post-production process like never before on one of our films. 

Content-wise, I’m also really thrilled with the audio commentary with Sam and cast members Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace and Bryce Dallas Howard.  This is by far the biggest cast commentary offering that we have presented on any of the Spidey DVD’s and to get their take on filmmaking, along with Sam’s, as well as their personal journeys during the movie-making process is very enlightening.

The rest of the DVD added value items are equally entertaining.  There are hilarious bloopers, photo galleries, videos, a commentary with producers Laura Ziskin, Avi Arad, editor Bob Murawski, visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk and me, and many more interesting features.  Additionally, as Sony has done in the past, we have included a 2 channel stereo mix supervised by Sam and Bob.  Although these mixes are getting rarer and rarer to find in a 5.1 world, we’re always happy to make this sound option available to the viewer.  This way, if you don’t have surround sound, you still have an audio option that matches your output so you don’t constantly have to ride the volume button on your remote, essentially re-mixing the movie yourself – Sam and Bob have already done that for you. 

Enjoy!

Grant Curtis