[IMG:L]When director Sam Raimi heard his Sony Imageworks team planned to meet with journalists for a behind-the-scenes look at Spider-Man 3, he rushed right over to the screening room just to praise their contributions to the trilogy. Lest the action buffs and hero fans worry that it’s all techie mumbo jumbo, the director praised the crew’s attention to storytelling.
“I’m glad you get a chance to see some of their wizardry, their artistry, their grace with motion,” said Raimi. “They do so many things. They have to be math wizards. They’ve got to be computer geniuses. They’ve got to understand the human heart. At the same time, they’ve got to have a sense of duty and visuals. They seem to have it all so it’s been a great pleasure and honor for me to work with these guys over the last few years. I just wanted to pop over here to tell you that.”
With the Spider-Man 3 DVD, fans will get a peek inside the secrets of the film’s great new creatures, the Sandman and Venom. Bonus features will reveal how the visual effects team at Sony Imageworks created these new grainy or gooey monsters.
In Spider-Man 3, Spidey faces villains like he’d never seen before: Sandman could dematerialize when it suited him, yet solidify in time to clobber the webbed one. Venom could slither around with all the same spiderrific powers, even turning Peter Parker himself dark. If fans complained there wasn’t enough Venom in the movie, there was certainly plenty that went into creating him.
First came the goo that fell from space and turned Spider-Man inky black. This goo would ultimately turn Edie Brock into Venom once Peter Parker peeled it away. Digital Effects Supervisor Peter Nofz‘s job was to give Raimi the perfect goo. His team created programs that gave the black goo fingers reaching over Peter’s arm, then thinner worms extending out of the growing mass. The art department came up with more solid models, including a pile of slimy bones that they called “chicken wings and ketchup.”
After six months, Raimi okayed the wormy, bony goo. Then the team had to invent the physics of space goo. “We’re trying to figure out how liquid is goo, how far can it jump, where does it go?” said Nofz.
In the final confrontation between Spidey and Venom, Nofz realized that Raimi‘s original setting would not quite work. Instead of wrapping with a nighttime battle, Nofz convinced Raimi that the fight needed to progress into morning.
“One of the things we discovered was a black goo monster against a black night sky doesn’t work that well,” Nofz admitted. “We convinced Sam to actually have dawn come in a little earlier. That’s why we have a little early morning sky here. That made our monster look much better against that sky.”
Animation Supervisor Spencer Cook took over once the Venom character formed. He relied on original comic book artwork for inspiration on Venom’s look. Since comic books are still photos, Venom in motion was a pure creation of the film.
[IMG:R]”One of the things that Sam Raimi asked me in the beginning of the project was how would Venom move differently than Spider-Man?” said Cook. “And how would black suited Spider-Man move differently? So I did this test early on to sort of play around with different ideas of how we could convey the different kinds of personality and the different kinds of characteristics with these characters that have similar abilities.”
Cook‘s test footage showed rough animation of a Venom character crawling around New York skyscarpers, ultimately raising his arms in triumph, shaking his fists in the air. “With Venom here I was focusing on lizard-like or insect-like kind of inhuman movement to try to mix into the body language of the character. Edie Brock, in his enhanced version when he becomes Venom, is very much arrogant and gleeful about the evil qualities that he has so we were trying to convey the idea that he’s arrogant and sort of show off-y. Here we really pushed it to the limit. This is one of our animators, Bernd Angerer, and I just told Bernd, ‘Just ham it up. Just go as far as you can with it.’
Actor Topher Grace may have had less to do with the physicality of Venom than the CGI artists. Not only did they control his moves, but they provided the models. Home video footage showed Sony Imageworks animators jumping around. These geeks inspired some of Venom’s slick moves.
“One of the things that we do in addition to collecting as much visual reference of the actors as possible, we also play around with ideas on our own. We videotape ourselves doing this action. What we’re maybe looking for in these reference pieces is trying to pick out the subtle, organic qualities of how a human being moves and how the body language is conveyed on an unconscious level.”
The animators got to play action hero or super villain a little bit, without the years of acrobatic training required of real stunt men. “Even though we’re just jumping off a chair, there’s still a lot of good ideas in here of how a human being lands and sets up to begin another move. You can see that some of these are shot at the animators’ homes as well, so we were constantly thinking about this stuff day in and day out.”
Spidey’s other big foe in Spider-Man 3, The Sandman, required a different sort of physics. Special Projects Computer Graphics Supervisor Jonathan Cohen oversaw the computer programs that allowed Thomas Haden Church to dissolve into sand particles and reshape at will.
A video segment showed the program’s progression, from calculating sand particles as spherical balls, evolving to the more bumpy, realistic particles that artists manipulated by the millions. To make sure the program obeyed the real world physics of sand, developers poured actual sand to study its properties.
“This was the first test we did with a large number,” Cohen explained the close up of sand pouring down the screen. “That’s 50,000 sand grains. This next one is 300,000 grains which is about a teaspoon of sand, something like that, to give you a sense of the scale of the problem we had to deal with.”
Then the animators practiced creating their digital sand to match the real shots they filmed. Ultimately, they were able to make sand form the face and body of Church in the Sandman’s “birth” scene.
“You can see you get this really beautiful kind of stacking, piling behavior and this all happens essentially for free, just because we’re basing it on the physics of the actual material.”
[IMG:L]Cook came back into the process for the finale, in which Sandman absorbs enough sand to turn himself into a giant beast. Again drawing on comic book artists’ conceptions of giants, Cook concerned himself with moving a giant Sandman believably.
“One of the tricky things with this character was figuring out the right speed for him to move,” said Cook. “We wanted him to seem gigantic and massive and feeling like he weighed a ton, but we also wanted him to be able to move quickly enough to be a threat to these small little characters. We were always trying to find the right balance of how he should move, how quickly he could move and still maintain the sense of tremendous weight.”
More Spidey secrets can be found in the bonus features of the Spider-Man 3 DVD or Blu Ray disc on October 30.
