Sony Picture Imageworks visual effects crew creates two state of the art CG creatures for Spider-Man 3
By Barbara Robertson The octopus-legged villain Doc Ock stole the effects show in Spider-Man 2 and that helped the film win a visual effects Oscar. So, what would director Sam Raimi and Oscar winning visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk invent for Spider-Man 3 to top that? Three villains, two of which the Sony Pictures Imageworks created using new, state of the art computer graphics techniques.
“We had unique challenges, ones we’ve never encountered before,” says Stokdyk, who led a crew of 270 at Imageworks that created 930 shots. In addition to Imageworks, BUF, Evil Eye Pictures, Furious FX, Gentle Giant Studios, Giant Killer Robots, Halon Entertainment, Tweak Films and X1fx also contributed to Spider-Man 3’s visual effects.
Spidey’s latest three villains are the New Goblin, Sandman and Venom. Harry Osborn (James Franco), Peter’s sometime best friend, who inherits his father’s villainy, is the New Goblin. For flying fighting shots between the New Goblin and Spider-Man, Imageworks created digital doubles of Franco and Maguire onto which they placed images of the actors’ faces captured with a motion control system developed by John Schmidt.
Sandman and Venom are the CG characters. Sandman in his human form is the beleaguered and brutal Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) who becomes a shape-shifter after being accidentally atomized. The goo, evil incarnate, is a symbiote blasted to earth in a meteor that attaches itself first to Peter Parker’s (Tobey Maguire) Spider-Man suit and then to the manipulative Eddie Brock (Topher Grace). Eddie becomes Venom. Imageworks teams worked for more than two years to develop techniques for creating Sandman and Venom.
“Our Sandman character was the ultimate combination of particle effects with character animation,” says Stokdyk. “And the Venom character, the whole symbiote goo part of him, was incredibly challenging. There’s a base character animation layer that animation supervisor Spencer Cook and the animators did and then an effects layer that CG supervisor David Seager and fx animation lead Ryan Laney on the goo team came up with that took it to a whole new level of visual complexity.”
Using Imageworks proprietary Sandstorm software and their own lighting program, Katana, the final image is lit and sand particles are added to integrate the digital character into a photographic plate.
