Venom was brought to life using the absolute latest in technology and techniques, some of which was developed specifically to put Raimi’s vision on the screen.  Scott and Spencer discuss the challenges of creating the Venom Symbiote.

Scott Stokdyk - Visual Effects Supervisor

Scott remembers Venom as both a technical and artistic challenge:

In Spider-Man 3 the villains have an extraordinary element to them that we had to fight very, very hard to make look believable. We wanted our villains doing heavy effects with an emotional impact and still look rooted in the real world. And we had to bring in alien components for Venom – the kind of abilities we don’t normally see.

The symbiotic goo didn’t move like anything in nature, so to make it believable required an unusual combination of CG tools and animation. Spencer Cook and I worked closely with [costume designer] Jim Acheson. We decided that, as much as possible, we wanted the action to be physical. We wanted Tobey actually grabbing onto something as he pulled at the black symbiote, so we tried to always have a real piece of costume there when we shot. Then we enhanced the photography digitally. In some cases, it was just easier to replace the whole costume in CG, rather than try to hook up black goo or pieces of black synthetic costume to the real costume. What we avoided in this sequence was replacing the actor’s skin in CG. As we were shooting, everywhere that I knew the skin of the actor was going to be revealed, we never had any costume on that area of Tobey’s body. Everywhere I knew we didn’t have to reveal skin, whether it was covered with black goo or covered with the original costume, we had the costume on the actor.

Sam Raimi is very much an actor’s director, and after the last movie – especially – it  became clear that he was going to be most happy if he could direct the actors and get their real facial performances on screen, even in these CG actor stunt shots. So Sam would direct the actor through all the beats of the shot and get the real actor’s face; and then we would use that photography as a face-replacement element. We didn’t do a face-replacement for every shot, of course – we did our share of CG faces – but we tried to do them in key shots where Sam wanted to see the real actors. We always knew we had the back-up of going all-CG if the live action stuff didn’t work out.

Then we had the challenge of Venom in a heightened emotional state, when he’s visibly a non-human alien – his mouth reveals monstrous alien teeth. Originally, there were two places we thought we’d be able to use the animatronic head [produced by Frontline Designs] for those kinds of transformations; but with script changes, we wound up just using the mouth portion of it. We shot specific angles on the animatronic mouth and composited them in a few cases onto a stunt person wearing the Venom costume. For more extreme shots, where Sam wanted an even more dynamic animated mouth, we added a CG version with teeth and the classic Venom tongue to shots of the stunt guys in costume. For the most dynamic shots, we animated and created a CG Venom from scratch.

The all CG version of Venom evolves and becomes more of a monster throughout the movie until, by the final battle, he is what we called “comic book Venom” – a moving mass of swarming black tendrils that have formed themselves into this monstrous shape. That was our biggest Venom challenge – to combine great character animation with intense effects animation to bring this character to life.

Spencer Cook - Animation Supervisor

Spencer said the Venom symbiote was a very unusual challenge since it was alive but unlike any creature anyone had ever seen before:

We deal with lots of technically complex characters and situations, but the Venom goo was extremely complex conceptually as well. It didn’t have any particular form. It evolved depending on what happened in the shot, so the animators had to work with a constantly changing but organic shape. It took a lot of patience.

Sam and I spent a lot of time figuring out what happened to Peter Parker and Spider-Man when he was taken over by the Venom symbiote. We wanted to make sure that everybody perceived this as the same person, but with an altered personality. A lot of conversations I had with Sam in the beginning were about how we would display this different persona through body language. We came up with ways to exaggerate his poses. We made him faster. The way he swings is rougher and more reckless, as if he doesn’t care as much about his personal safety. He does bigger leaps and long swings, shooting the web at the very last second before he hits the ground. Black-suited Spider-Man is more aggressive, so he’ll move a little quicker here and there, hunch his shoulders a little more, pull his elbows up a little higher when he’s stuck to a wall. We tried to find poses that the classic Spidey would not do – where the red-suited classic Spider-Man was graceful and elegant in his motions, black-suited Spider-Man is more blunt, rough, and reckless.

The first scene of the Venom symbiote consuming Peter Parker was a great breakthrough for us and was one of our earliest test shots. You can see the tendrils emerging from the goo, exploring and testing and finally adhering until the symbiote has totally taken over. That’s when we knew we were on the right track.

We had to establish a pretty complicated pipeline, because making it behave and move the way Sam wanted it ended up being a crossover between pure hand animation in Maya and procedural animation in Houdini. The character animators focused on the emotion, the feeling, and getting every detail of its living essence exactly right. The effects artists added an amazing level of organic detail through procedural animation that really put the goo into the scenes.

Most of the time Venom is more humanoid than goo, so we wanted to convey his evil essence consistently across several different physical states. If black-suited Spider-Man was a ramped-up version of classic Spider-Man, Venom was a ramped-up version of black-suited Spider-Man. For animating Venom, we looked at tons of reference footage of animals. Lions and cheetahs, in particular, were very good reference. We liked their aggressive, predatory movements, and we re-created them in Venom in the way that he crouches and jumps and attacks. Everything we did for the Venom animation was based on that reference. We were trying to find a language that would work so that the Venom character would be consistent, whether he was live or animated, no matter which form he was in.