If character and story are central to Raimi’s filmmaking ethos, the ability to create mind blowing action sequences through ground breaking CGI animation and painstakingly filmed ‘live’ stunt shots have become a hallmark of the Spider-Man films. Spider-Man 3 is no exception.
The new villains – Sandman and Venom – presented their own unique challenges to the filmmakers. Sandman can shape himself into any object or creature and dissolve into a million grains of sand before forming into something entirely different – a striking image that is not exactly easy to create on film.
“We’ve been trying very hard to out do ourselves and we have had a great team of artists and technicians on the CGI and animation storyboard side,” says Raimi of the visual effects challenges in Spider-Man 3.
“It’s really a team of hundreds of people that work on these pictures that are responsible for any improvements and I think they out did themselves this time.
“There were about 900 different effects shots in total and each one was different and a different challenge. We had to figure out ‘how do we make Sandman? How do we make sand move a grain at a time in such a way so that it stacks properly? Sand, has a certain degree of repose, it doesn’t really stack at a 40-degree angle or a 20-degree angle.
“So there was a lot of things we had to learn about the materials we were shooting with and we had to shoot a lot of camera tests because we had to recreate the sand and create a character out of the Sandman.
“And everything he did had to really feel like it was really made out of real sand as opposed to a CGI computer pixel. So a lot of research went into the movement of sand, the look of it, how it interacts with the light, how it falls, how it blows. I spent a lot more time photographing sand than I wish I had!”
Venom too, presented plenty of obstacles for the team. Venom is created
by an alien symbiote, which initially looks like black goo. This alien form attaches itself to Peter Parker and turns him into a black suited Spider-Man with enhanced powers.
“It’s a story of Peter Parker’s movement into darkness,” says Raimi. “We use the black suit as a metaphor: the darker he gets as a human being, the more the alien symbiote is drawn to him until he literally wears a black suit.”
When Parker realises that he is being taken over by this alien life force, he eventually is able to free himself from it. However it finds a new host in fellow Daily Bugle photographer Eddie Brock (Topher Grace); transforming Eddie into Venom, a fearsome creature with similar powers to Spider-Man.
“Venom is made of this black liquid that comes to life and we had to figure out how that would move. Would it just flow like water? Would it be more solid? How could it have a persona if it just moved like water? It had to have menace. So there was a tremendous amount of animation tests to work out how something like that would come about.
“We tried to take what we had learned on the first two pictures and what all our artists had learned and stand on the shoulders of all the achievements made by all the other effects companies and all the technology that had been developed around the world and apply it to this picture at this time.”
Posted by Thin Whte Duke
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