Series: Spider-Man 3

Related Links

0

House of Sand and Venom: Special FX work in 'Spider-Man 3'

It's quite a year for special effects. And while author Salman Rushdie's observation that most movies are, strictly speaking, "cartoons" now - i.e., they have as much, or more, animation (even if digital) in them than live action elements - this year, this summer in particular, is especially, well, cartoony.

The shift can be noticed just for handicappers of the VES Awards - those FX-only statuettes given out each February in Hollywood by the Visual Effects Society. Last year, the middle "Pirates" installment, "Dead Man's Chest," had the field nearly to itself, and swept all the awards - and later, the Oscar.

This year, the field is as crowded as the Presidential race - not only the concluding "Pirates" installment, but we've had "300" earlier this spring, with the Silver Surfer's on-screen arrival imminent, "Transformers" and the latest "Harry Potter" still in the pipeline, and never mind the Yule-season adaptation of "The Golden Compass" coming our way.

Quite a lot of (eye) candy in the store this time 'round. And oh yes: Kicking off the summer was the third "Spider-Man," as well.

Perhaps no surprise then that in order not to get lost in this estimable fray, Sony Imageworks -Sony's in-house FX shop - had a recent media breakfast after "S3" opened, in order to give reporters a behind-the-scenes peek at how the webslinger's lastest adventures were assembled out of ones and zeroes.

To be fair, the breakfast was also to tout the digital work in the upcoming animated penguin-fest "Surf's Up," but that's a topic for another day.

The Spidey presenters were first out of the gate as we finished our hot sauce-less scrambled eggs and made our way to the theatre on the Imageworks' lot (located in the bustling, revived downtown Culver City, just a film can's discus-like throw from the main Sony lot, which was once upon a time known as "MGM").

The first speaker was Yair Landau, the vice-president of Sony Pictures overall, but more specifically, the President of Sony Pictures Digital. And per Rushdie, you might be thinking, "well, aren't all pictures more or less digital now?," and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong. But SPD's charter is to "bring together Sony Pictures' digital artists, technologists and production software engineers," in a division consisting "of Sony Pictures Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Online Entertainment, SonyPictures.com and Mobile. The division produces stories, characters, images and games that are conceived, created and rendered digitally."

Not only rendered that way, but shared from one platform to the next - i.e.,digital FX footage from a film often going directly into the videogame adaptation, etc.

View our Spidey 3 F/X Gallery

So it was Landau talked about hunting down the film rights to Peter Parker & Co. back in the early-to-mid 90's, since he felt the "technology and artistry had reached a place where we could make you feel you were surging through Manhattan at 90 miles an hour."

Sony has been very shrewdly aware of the digital possibilities for the digital arachnid-man. Having covered Hollywood in general, and FX in particular, for some years now, I've conversed with - and written about - Spider-Man's visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk, for some years now.

When the second film was out, Stokdyk recounted how his then visual effects producer, the legendary John Dykstra, would actually sit in on preproduction meetings with the writers letting them know what sorts of scenes and moves - dare we call them tableaux? - would be possible based on the technology they were using then (and really, the story for these films essentially boils down to software packages like Maya and RenderMan being updated and refined, and lots and lots of people-hours spent programming and rendering); what had been a traditionally "post production" phase of filmmaking - the special effects - and now begun in preproduction, since digits, and their use, suffuse every phase of moviemaking.

And while Landau's instincts were correct - computer technology was finally coming of age in a film context, and superhero films that weren't automatically lame could at last be made - even those earlier "Spider-Man" chapters weren't flawless in their application of FX work. In other words, for some of those scenes swinging through Manhattan's canyons, I didn't feel I was surging at all -if the White House hasn't ruined the use of "surge" for the foreseeable future - but rather, that I was watching some good digital FX work that didn't quite look "real."

And what the first two installments work as films weren't the effects, per se, but the stories and performances around them - especially in the second film, with its clever metaphor that really love, and be loved, you must be willing to be, in all senses, "unmasked."

Those two strains came together in the third film - FX work and performance - in the character of Sandman. Here, Stokdyk and his crew -- he's kept "much of the same team throughout" the past few years on this one franchise - worked to create both an effect, and a "performance" to augment the work being done by actor Thomas Haden Church, and overseen, of course, by director Sam Raimi.

As far as pushing themselves technically, Stokdyk noted that FX work on all of the first "Spider-Man" took up 4 ½ terabytes of space on Imageworks' machines.

For the first "Sandman" shot alone, that number leapt to 37 terabytes.

The challenge for Stokdyk's crew was to complement - though in some cases, supersedethe performance the were getting from Church, especially in the first scene where Sandman is created, and rises up out of the granules to gaze sadly at himself - and a cherished memento - before reforming himself and striding off, striped shirt and all, for his eventual showdown with the webhead.

So a variety of methods were used, all of which Imageworks remains proud of - they especially drew attention to a recent New York Times article , by physics professor James Kakalios, complementing the production on the accuracy of its "cutting-edge physics."

The sand, then, behaved in a fashion true to sand (though there were also considerations about whether the Sand would be "wet" or "dry" - or to what degree - in a given shot), and this was mostly done by creating the sand particle-by-particle; programming a bunch of miniature, "Bucky Ball"-looking orbs to behave and react by the thousands, as they formed human bodies, or blew away in the wind.

here's always been a new frontier in FX work - for awhile it was hair and fur, then water and fire, and now it seems to masses of sand that remain accurate down to the grain level.

Stokdyk's Imageworks crew seems to have achieved that -and more (yes, there were demonstrations of how Venom's suit was programmed, as well as some tours of "virtual alleys" created for Spider-Man's showdown with the "New Goblin," but the thing they were most excited about all morning was the sand).

The only question is, after working on these effects for nearly seven years, from the first "Spider-Man" through the culminating, mega-byte (probable) finale, what will Stokdyk's team do next?

Well, in the immediate future, there's a well-deserved vacation. No mention, however, of whether the spot involved will have lots of sandy beaches, or not.

Mark London Williams covers Hollywood for numerous publications, including "Below the Line," "Monsters and Critics," and "Moving Pictures Magazine." He also writes the "Danger Boy" time travel adventures from Candlewick Press. You can reach him at scribe@dangerboy.com