Black on Black

There were many challenges involved with lighting venom in a night-time environment

“It’s black on black a lot of the time,” observes Venom visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin. What defines a black-painted metal object is not the direct illumination but the reflections of the environment around it. “What we needed to do was to dress the reflections into the surface in order to give us a read on the shape. Initially we were driving it from the HDRI maps that we captured on the locations on set, but Venom came out looking like a highly polished 1950s car driving down the strip in Vegas. He was a glittering galaxy of lights, which didn’t make him appear particularly threatening because he ended up looking like a Christmas tree sometimes!” Franklin continues: “We ended up lighting him in much the same way you would light a car for a commercial, where you’re using big reflection cards and bounce panels to carefully create reflections that sculpt to the shape of the body. Then we added a separate set of low-light reflections from the environment; this gives us the definition on the surface so we’ll be able to see his physique and all of the intricate organic patterning that moves over his surface.”