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!