Spiderman 3 - the making

Posted by Vasisht Ramachandran in May 30th, 2007

Now that Spidey’s been swinging around for a while, let me show you glimpses of how the amazing shots in the movie were made. It all looks so simple, but you will be startled to know what the team over at Imageworks and others did to get it all on screen - its just mind boggling!

The visual effects of spiderman 3 were primarily done at Sony Pictures Imageworks, with help from BUF, Evil Eye Pictures, Furious FX, Gentle Giant Studios, Giant Killer Robots, Halon Entertainment, Tweak Films and X1fx. Let us start with the swinging scenes. Swinging scenes were a mixture of live-action and Computer Generated (CG) elements. Like one such breakup shown here, Toby Maguire was shot against a blue-screen, which was replaced by the background. In the last part of the scene, the actor was fully replaced by a digital model, which gets violently wedged into the wall.

You can see the performance-capture methodology here, where the photos of the actor are used to digitally reconstruct them in 3D, which was in turn used for their performances in scenes which were too dangerous for the actual actors. A similar methodology was used for capturing performances in the Matrix films (2 and 3).

But the biggest challenge that faced the good people over at Imageworks was the sandman. It is never easy to do stuff like sand and water in CG. They are composed of millions of small particles, which have to interact with each other, and the environment around them. As you can see here, a basic shape was first animated, and then sand was added to the character. The motion of the sand was calculated by a combination of rigid-body dynamics and fluid-simulations. Basically, stacking was calculated as small spheres, like stacking up oranges, and then, smaller particles were simulated in each sphere to give a believable sand-like feel.

For the black-goo, they used a combination of hand-animation (hard-work) and simulations. You can see it here.

If you want to get more details, you can read the wonderful article at CGSociety here.

Yeah, the videos take their time to load, but are worth it. If you get an urge to see the movie after knowing how it was made, well, it is natural, don’t be alarmed.