Spencer Cook - Animation Supervisor

Spencer said the techniques and technologies for creating digital doubles improved significantly over the course of the three Spider-Man movies:

The alley fight between Peter Parker and Harry Osborn as the New Goblin and the Bell Tower scenes were big ones for blending animation and CG characters to get convincing digital doubles.

The New Goblin relies a lot on his Sky Stick, so we spent a lot of time on previsualization to make sure it looked believable. We studies tons of reference of snowboarders. We had reference of them jumping up in the air, twisting and flipping, and we used a lot of those moves for Harry on his Sky Stick. We also looked at skateboarding reference. Then we re-created a lot of those snowboard and skateboard moves in our animation.

Venom was another big challenge, of course, even when he was in human form, since we used a digital double whenever he was doing the extreme stunts. Throughout this picture I was very concerned with blending what the actors and the stuntmen were doing with the animation, so that every character would be consistent all the way through. So, early on in the production, whenever Topher was brought in for a costume fitting, I would be there – sometimes with Sam, sometimes not – and we would play around a bit, acting out stuff. I would act out moves; Topher would act out moves. We were trying to find a language that would work so that the Venom character would be consistent, whether he was live or animated.

In Spider-Man movies, we’re adding an animated character into a real world – and we’re always very aware that human beings are really good at perceiving body language and subtleties in that real world. Every person in the audience is an expert on human and animal motion; and so, we have to deal with the real physics of our animated character. We have to think about how far he can jump, how fast he should fall and things like that. Of course, there is a very real difference between real physics and movie physics; but, even though no real person could do what Spider-Man does, we wanted to make it look believable within the context of the movie.

To help do that as convincingly as possible, Imageworks developed a physics-based ballistics tool that let us check action against actual physics. The acceleration and velocity a character has when he jumps off a surface is going to determine how far he can jump. So we would start by blocking out the animation of the jump, just keyframed, by hand; and then we’d use the physics tool to check if the distance he traveled and the speed at which he was traveling were realistic. The physics tool would look at the first frame of Spider-Man leaving the surface, and from that it would determine, ‘If he is moving that quickly and with that much force when he leaves the surface, he can travel X amount of distance.’ And if he was traveling a greater distance in our animation than he’d really be able to, based on the calculations in that initial frame, we’d increase his acceleration off the surface so he’d land where we wanted him to land.

We didn’t tie ourselves too rigidly to the physics tool, though. In these kinds of movies, if you animate action that is too realistic, it won’t be dramatic and exciting enough. In the real world, a guy swinging from one skyscraper to another wouldn’t look that interesting or dynamic. So the Spider-Man animation was a combination of eyeballing it and using the physics tool to check our work. Most of what Spider-Man does is not physically possible for a human being anyway, so ultimately it came down to what we all thought looked good.

Of course we had other technology updates too. For instance, we updated the visible controls that animators could grab on the character. With these visible controls, animators could just click on the character’s wrist or torso or any other part of his body to move it around. That’s not anything new – most rigs have that now – but it was new to this version of Spider-Man. We also updated the spine controls. We always had the option to use one of two spine configurations in the original rig but the switching controls have been updated. The forward spine rotates from the waist up and the reverse spine rotates from the upper chest down. Depending on the action Spidey is doing, the animator can choose which spine to use.