“With great power comes great responsibility”: Spider-Man is a huge success in cinemas worldwide. We spoke to the visual effects designers about their work.
One reason for the huge success of Spider-Man is largely due to the perfect casting. With Tobey Maguire (Wonder Boys, Cider House Rules), an ideal Peter Parker was cast, who was able to win over every viewer with his empathetic portrayal. By the way, Leonardo DiCaprio and Freddie Prinze Jr. were originally intended for the role. Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Darkman, Army of Darkness) also proved to be a lucky choice as director. “As a SpiderMan fan, I felt a great responsibility and I focussed on all the things that I think define the character,” says the director. “I wanted to capture the spirit and soul of Spider-Man and tell the best story possible. In my eyes, the strength of the character has always been that he’s a real-life person – one of us. He goes through junior high and high school, he’s something of an outsider, he doesn’t get the girl he wants, he’s broke. And then something extraordinary happens to him that turns him into a superhero.”
The effect makers
In addition to the excellent actors and the exciting story, the effects makers in particular make a major contribution to the success of Spider-Man. First and foremost “effects veteran” John Dykstra, who as visual effects designer was responsible for the aesthetics of the film: “Visual effects have a dramatic arc of tension, as is the case with the main characters. VFX designers play a very important role today, as they use their visual capabilities to inject a certain personality into the effects, adding a touch of emotion and drama to the story.” (see box: John Dykstra: visual effects designer for Spider-Man on page 26)
Filming begins…
The pre-production phase began in May 2000, with tests and pre-visualisations being carried out over the first seven to eight months. The animation team was initially quite small. It consisted of four people and was later joined by six more.
On 8 January 2001, the time had finally come: filming began in Hall 29 (Peter Parker’s home) at Sony Pictures Studios. John Dykstra and his team worked on around 500 effects shots for Spider-Man.
“When I joined the Spider-Man team, I knew we had to have the flexibility to take the character to places we couldn’t go ourselves,” says Dykstra. “No one would have allowed us to fly down the canyons at 60 miles an hour, or dive into New York traffic from a small balcony. So we had to create these locations virtually. That raised the question: How realistically can we do this? We needed a camera that could move through the spaces above the streets of New York without barriers. Spider-Man can land on a wall, or on a small flagpole, he moves his elbows and knees into positions that no human can reach.”
They experimented with motion capture during the pre-visualisation phase and, according to John Dykstra, soon came to the decision to use keyframe animation instead. Above all, this was more practical: they were able to respond more quickly to the director’s change requests, as they had to work with fixed data at Mo-Cap: “We had a colleague swinging from ring to ring and could see if we could assign these movements to someone swinging from net to net. Our animators then basically reconstructed these movements and poses in the computer,” says Dykstra. “The motion capture process is limited by the restricted movements of the human body. We realised that it would be easier to make the animators know exactly what the human body is than to modify that body to make it work for motion capture.”
Bill Diaz on the subject of motion capture: “I was involved in integrating motion capture into SpiderMan. I have nothing against mo-cap either. It’s a great tool for certain things. But with Spider-Man in particular, we’re talking about a character who spends most of his time climbing up walls or swinging from one house to another – you can’t do that with motion capture. If you do, it’s going to look like Tiger and Dragon when the actors are being pulled up and down on wires.”
In the scene where Spider-Man fights the goblin in the burning house and tries to avoid the razor blades – all completely CG. Likewise the scene in which Spider-Man, still in his self-tailored costume, climbs up the wall of the house – no motion capture!
An old Boeing factory in Downey California served as the backdrop for the scene in which the Green Goblin blows up the World Unity Festival in New York’s Times Square in order to kill the CEO of his old company. A similar set was erected in Sony’s Hall 27, with Mary Jane Watson dangling dangerously high above Times Square.
Director Sam Raimi: “The sequence in Time Square with the World Unity Festival was extremely complicated and was filmed in different locations.” This sequence would have been impossible without the help of production designer Neil Spisak, VFX designer John Dykstra ASC, special effects supervisor John Frazier, stunt coordinator Jeff Habberstad and storyboard artist Doug Lefler, whose work was responsible for the success of the scene. Raimi continues: “We filmed the basics for the visual effects directly in New York in Times Square. We then shot the building structures in Hall 27 on the Sony lot.
Neil Spisak and his team designed and built a three-storey skyscraper section in the hall with a balcony section that you could break away. That’s where we filmed a lot of this action sequence. We shot other elements of the scene in Downey, where we had recreated a street section of Time Square. Several other building blocks were created in the computer, and because of the different processes and locations, this became one of the most complicated, multi-layered scenes in the entire film. The planning alone took months.”
This scene posed a particular challenge for Neil Spisak. He had to ensure that the buildings he designed were proportioned in such a way that they fitted seamlessly into the final image. Neil Spisak: “I replaced an entire building in Times Square with another one that our art department had designed and built. In addition to the balcony piece from Hall 27, we developed another set that represented the ground floor and adjacent street level of our building in Times Square. When the floor of the balcony crumbles, parts of it must fall onto the other set. In the final cut, it looks like it was all filmed on the same building – a building that has become part of the characters in the film.”
John Frazier, physical effects supervisor, says: “We controlled the hydraulics of the balcony by computer, and our lead actress Kirsten Dunst was standing on the balcony, which we wanted to tilt at a 90-degree angle. We broke the windows and threw debris at her. It was like a rollercoaster ride in a theme park every time she stood in this contraption, which we then collapsed. But of course Kirsten’s safety was our top priority and she held her ground.”
Every time you look up at the balcony, it’s a digital shot. When you look down from the balcony, it’s live action footage with digital elements. Bill Diaz, Lead Character Animator: “Based on our pre-visualisations, the team took a camera, placed it somewhere high up on the Marriott Hotel in Times Square and then shot “live background plates” from a balcony, which we later mapped onto virtual background plates. This enabled us to pair the camera with the leprechaun flying between the balloons and the ‘live background plates’.”
Ian Bryce, producer: “SpiderMan and the Goblin are flying so high above the city that it was impossible for us to film live action at those heights. So we worked with Sony Pictures Imageworks and used a technique called photogrammetry to create wireframe animations of parts of New York that we had previously photographed in great detail from all angles. We combined these photographs with the animations in the computer to create the moving background. This enabled us to incorporate into this world either the actors moving in front of a green screen – or the computer-generated characters.”
Don Burgess, ASC (chief cinematographer) had to work closely with the director, producer and effects team for the TimeSquare scene: “I had to design a lighting system that would keep the thread running through all the different locations where we shot the sequence. I had lighting studies done – photos taken at 15-minute intervals from Times Square. This allowed me to determine what the best look for the scene would be. We also executed the lighting concept indoors and then reproduced it in bright daylight on the set in Downey. It was an incredible task to bring it all together to make it really work.”
The priority is in the detail
Sony Pictures Imageworks used Maya for all the character animation because, according to Bill Diaz, it gave them the ability to generate a lot of custom shelves. “We can throw a scene or a file at an animator new to the team and they can quickly learn the ropes and know how to work with the model or animate it.”
All the buildings in the photorealistic sets of New York City were modelled in Maya, the texture painting was done with Studio Paint. Maya was also used for the modelling and animation of the spider that bites Peter Parker. However, the software was mainly used for the modelling of the main characters. Peter Nofz (CG Supervisor): “Our goal was flawless character modelling. Spider-Man and the Green Goblin are the stars of the show, so the CG versions had to look realistic.
According to lead animator Spencer Cook, the digital versions of the main characters were used as stunt doubles for Spider-Man and the Green Goblin in scenes that were extremely dangerous and impossible for humans to handle. Edward Taylor, lead modeller: “The character setup started with model construction. We cyber-scanned Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe and their stunt doubles, then processed the data and imported it into Maya. The goblin was modelled with polygons and nurbs, Spider-Man was created in nurbs, which were replaced by subdivision surfaces before lighting to avoid damaging the surface.”
Koji Morihiro, character set-up artist, built the Inverse Kinematics (IK) and Forward Kinematics (FK) skeletons for Spider-Man, while J.J. Blumenkranz did the same for the Goblin. Because the Spider-Man model appears in so many close-ups, it was a particular challenge for both of them.
Morihiro: “I placed the limbs in the CG model analogue to the bone structure of a human. This provided the animators with a basis that enabled them to rotate these limbs with the IK handles and other controls.” To enable the animators to start animating immediately, he applied temporary geometries to the limbs. “At the same time, I applied the deformation files, which carried information about the swelling of the muscles and the rotation of the limbs.”
Bill Diaz, Lead Animator: “In nine out of ten shots, Spider-Man swings from building to building. It’s important to get the arcs right here. Maya’s F-curve editor is very solid and gives you the ability to control the weighting of the tangents of a curve well so that you can then stretch a curve and get a nice arc as you swing.
A key benefit was Maya’s MEL scripting and API programming environment. Scott Stokdyk, VFX Supervisor, comments: “With the help of MEL and the API, we were able to customise Maya to the needs of the CG departments and transfer data back and forth quite easily thanks to the standardised language. Maya has a lot of helpful tools, but with the help of MEL and the API we were able to solve many problems by programming tools ourselves.”
Spencer Cook developed “Shelf Buttons” for a scene he was working on: “I liked the fact that I could cut and paste certain commands from Script Commander to make myself buttons, which helped me enormously in simplifying the workflow.”
For Anthony LaMolinara, Animation Director, Maya’s Cloth Simulation capabilities were hugely important in terms of realistic animation: “We used Maya Cloth for Spider-Man’s customised costume and I have to say that it really enhanced the animation. The fact that Maya Cloth is part of the software helped us enormously.”
The priority is (once again) in the detail
The Spider-Man costume was developed within six months. It is based on tension and is made from one piece, from the boots to the mask. “We worked the boots directly into the costume, and the costume itself was printed with computer-generated rectangular stencils to create the illusion of a 3-D effect. There are over 120 layers of silk on the suit to provide the shading and highlighting, and the mask is fitted with Oakley lenses,” says costume designer James Acheson (Dangerous Loves, Brazil). The costume’s mesh was modelled and coloured from latex and the final design was cut by computer-controlled cutting tools. A team of gluers and painters applied the mesh to the compressed costume and painted it with various metal-coloured layers. A total of 24 costumes were made for Spider-Man, including some that were to be badly worn or even torn apart in the course of the plot.
The Goblin’s costume was inspired by Japanese art prints, reptile scales, comics and space suits. Actor Willem Dafoe needed 30 minutes a day and three helpers to slip into his costume.
You can’t do it without problems…
“Some people may wonder in one scene or another how this is supposed to work. They wonder how Spider-Man can move so fast. But damn, he’s Spider-Man after all!” – says Bill Diaz.
Always difficult: portraying Spider-Man as a believable human character animation in CG, along with his superhero abilities. In comparison, characters like Godzilla or Stuart Little are easier to animate. Bill Diaz: “Who knows how dinos really walked? As long as the things move fluidly and simulate a certain body weight, the animation looks believable.”
On the other hand, everyone knows how humans move, when running, when jumping. Our eyes are trained to recognise when movements look unrealistic, even if we know nothing about animation. We grow up with this capacity for abstraction. So the biggest challenge was to give Spider-Man the agility of a superhero and still make him look human in his movements. To achieve this, the weighting of the individual bones of a CG character is very important.
Too little emphasis and a character looks like a rubber ball, too much and he gives the impression of a dinosaur. The animators have done an excellent job in most of the animation sequences (such as when Spider-Man swings from building to building). However, in the fight sequences with criminals, the aforementioned rubber ball behaviour is definitely recognisable. A little less agility and speed would certainly have worked wonders here. Filming on the second part begins in January 2003. Tobey Maguire alias Spider-Man will then fight the villain Dr Octopus (Sam Neill), and Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane) will also be back. The film is due to be released in cinemas in 2004. The success of the SpiderMan film leads to a veritable flood of superhero films. The Marvel comics “The Hulk” (Ang Lee, Tiger&Dragon), “Daredevil” with Ben Affleck and “The Fantastic Four” hit the big screen as early as 2002.
John Dykstra
Effects veteran John Dykstra was responsible for the aesthetics of Spider-Man. Dykstra, originally an industrial designer and photographer, made his first steps on the film stage as an effects photographer and model maker. Soon afterwards, he developed a computer-controlled camera system for the National Science Foundation at the University of California in Berkeley, which would go down in history as the forerunner of motion capture technology. Together with George Lucas and Gary Kurtz, he is regarded as a co-founder of ILM and was responsible at the time (1977) for the creative team that designed and built the miniatures and camera systems for Star Wars. He also accepted the Oscar for “Best Visual Effects” on behalf of ILM.
in 1978, John Dykstra founded his own company – Apogee – with the same team and went on to supervise films such as Battlestar Galactica (1978) and Star Trek — the Motion Picture (1979), in which Apogee used the first Apple computers for the motion imaging systems and was nominated for an Oscar. Dykstra also produced effects for commercials and led Apogee’s development of pioneering motion control and blue screen technologies. Sony Pictures Imageworks, headed by John Dykstra, animation director Anthony LaMolinara and VFX producer Lydia Bottegoni, was responsible for the visual effects. Their most successful films include Cast Away, Hollow Man, Starship Troopers, Contact, Harry Potter, Men In Black II and, of course, Stuart Little, for which they received an Oscar nomination in 1999. Since hiring Oscar winner and VFX supervisor Ken Ralston as President in 1995 and Tim Sarnoff as Executive Vice President and General Manager in 1997, the company now has over 500 artists, engineers, technicians and support staff on the payroll, working in an 11,150 square metre property designed for the next generation of digital production.
Sony Pictures Imageworks has established the Digital Character Group, headed by Barry Weiss, Senior Vice President of Animation Production, and animation director Eric Armstrong (Jurassic Park, 1993). The department now consists of around 85 employees.
Imageworks is part of Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment (SPDE), an operating division of Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) that oversees all of SPE’s digital production activities and online properties, including Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Online Entertainment and the Digital Network Division, which includes SoapCity and Screenblast and SPIN, representing the studio’s online promotional presence.
