SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME

In Sony and Marvel’s multiverse-themed SpiderMan: No Way Home, the VFX team had to figure out ways to bring back memorable VFX-driven villains from the two previous Marc Webb-helmed Spider-Man movies that starred Andrew Garfield and the three of Sam Raimi’s films that were fronted by Tobey Maguire.

Directed by Jon Watts and starring Tom Holland as Spidey, No Way Home included the return of Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock, Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman, Jamie Foxx’s Electro and Rhys Ifans’ Lizard. But the movie’s 2,500 VFX shots also involved challenging action scenes — among them, the film’s climatic battle on Liberty Island. While this sequence required some bluescreen work, VFX supervisor Kelly Port says, “The entire Liberty Island, all the rest of the scaffolding, the statue, the island itself, all the construction work, trees, all the surrounding water, the distant city — that was all digital.”

For the character work, Port was focused on maintaining the nuances of each villain, “so a lot of reference was made to those previous films.”

For instance, in 2004’s Spider-Man 2 (the last superhero movie to win an Oscar in visual effects — see page 44), Doc Ock had tentacles that were part puppeteered, part CG. This time, they were fully CG, though for consistency Port says his crew referenced photographs of the original puppeteer tentacles from Sony’s archives.

With the multiverse theme and varying timelines, some characters, including Doc Ock, also required de-aging. Port says that this included compositing and facial tracking, as well as removing wrinkles and other such features.

Haden Church’s Sandman from 2007’s SpiderMan 3 was a challenging task at the time; although techniques have since evolved, he was still one of the more difficult characters in the film. “The character is a combination of two things: character animation, but then it’s also driven by a simulation. One feeds the other, and it’s a complex simulation with millions of grains of sand, all having to interact with one another.”

He says that they used some performance capture, “then obviously when he gets into more of the simulation side of things, the effects take over.”

The VFX on the film were produced by Digital Domain, Framestore and Sony’s Imageworks. Port is Oscar-nominated alongside Chris Waegner (Imageworks VFX supervisor), Scott Edelstein (Digital Domain VFX supervisor) and special effects supervisor Dan Sudick (who is also nominated for Free Guy).

In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doc Ock’s tentacles were fully CG, but they were only part CG and part puppeteered in 2004’s Spider-Man 2.