Uncle Ben's advice, "With great power comes great responsibility," has never been truer both for the character of Spider-Man, and for the visual effects artists who created the world in which he resides. Visual effects have the power to create anything that can be imagined. The responsibility of the visual effects team on a film is to use their craft to amplify the arc of the characters, because the characters are where the story lies.

My job on Spider-Man 2 was to be the liaison between the storyteller's imagination and the technology of visual effects, then design and oversee the execution of all the visual effects in the film. Most importantly, I wanted to keep the effects, spectacular or otherwise, subservient to the service of the story's characters.

In Spider-Man 2, our hero gets up close and personal with the villain, Doctor Otto Octavius, Doc Ock for short. He engages in extensive hand-to-hand combat with both real and virtual versions of Doc Ock, which required us to create more detailed CG versions of both characters. The reality of Spider-Man's moves and reactions to blows from the tentacles required a rethinking of the Spider-Man character, with higher expectations for the animators. We also see a CG Spider-Man without his mask in the train fight sequence, which required the development of a new CG skin pipeline.


VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS

Spider-Man had to fly higher, further, and more gracefully than ever before, and we had to be there with him. As with all superhero characters, Spider-Man has to do things that mere mortals cannot do. The challenge for Animation Supervisor Anthony LaMolinara and his team at Sony Pictures Imageworks, was to make impossible superhero moves look possible and to bend, but not break the limits of reality. One of the most difficult parts of the design of these shots was the camera move. The framing had to follow our hero and reinforce the thrill of the experience without calling attention to the camera move itself. The animators had to build in the kinds of mis-operation that would be appropriate to a cameraman who had to swing through the city with Spider-Man while composing shots.

Secrets of Spider-Man 2: The Nominees Tell All Creating Mechanical Effects for SPIDER-MAN 2 John Frazier Special Effects Supervisor Creating Character Animation for SPIDER-MAN 2 Anthony LaMolinara Animation Supervisor Creating Visual Effects for SPIDER-MAN 2 Scott Stokdyk Visual Effects Supervisor

To give the camera more flexibility, we built much more of New York City as a CG city than in the previous Spider-Man. The story required that we add an elevated train to the streets of Manhattan. We shot background plates and pieces of an actual elevated train in Chicago, mixed those together with our CG train, live plates from New York, and the CG streets of our virtually created New York. We showed greater distances, more of the city, and we brought the viewer closer to the buildings than ever before. These virtual city elements cut directly to live background plates of the city from Chicago and New York. Scott Stokdyk and his team at Sony Pictures Imageworks came up with several new techniques that created more, better-defined buildings, more realistic traffic, pedestrians and atmosphere -- and all within the bounds of a compressed post-production schedule.


CG CHARACTERS

Our villain, Doc Ock, and his personality were intimately tied to visual effects through his tentacles, which become inseparable from him in the second and third act after a horrible lab accident fuses man and machine together. In the story, the tentacles, as created by Doctor Octavius, have their own neural network. That network's only goal is to create fusion, which is fine as long as Doctor Octavius's mind is in control. Once the Inhibitor chip, the firewall between the doctor's brain and the tentacle's neural network, is breached, Doctor Octavius' higher brain function is taken over by the tentacle's obsession to recreate the fusion experiment, and our villain, Doc Ock is created. For this story to be told, each of the tentacles had to have a distinct personality. The individual heads of the tentacles had to have enough face-like qualities to express emotion. At director Sam Raimi's invitation, production designer Neil Spisak, costume designer James Atchison, and I collaborated on the tentacle design.

Animation supervisor Anthony La Molinara and the animators at Imageworks began to explore how the tentacles would move. The animators color coded each tentacle so it could be given a personality all its own. Edge Effects created the practical tentacle puppets and also contributed to the design of the look and movement of the tentacles. John Frazier's mechanical effects team came up with a rig to move Alfred Molina (Doc Ock) as if he were supported by the four tentacles. Movement tests were conducted with mockups, both virtual and physical. We researched natural, multi-armed creatures; octopi, spiders, quadrupeds, all creatures with long-jointed legs, and snakes for their body motion to help fine tune the tentacle's organic movements.

The tentacles had to have a mechanical quality as well as organic movements. The animators and puppeteers had to mix characteristics of all these examples. The tentacle's personalities in any given scene had to come from Doc Ock. Sam and Alfred had specific performance requirements for the tentacle quartet, which reflected the bi-polar nature of Doc Ock's personality.

The puppets and the CG tentacles were freely intercut throughout the film. Wide shots of Doc Ock or shots of him walking or climbing involved primarily CG tentacles. The medium and close-up shots used a mix of puppets and CG tentacles. The scene in the pier where Spider-Man convinces Doctor Octavius to take control of the tentacles is a good example of CG and live tentacles being intercut. In fact, many of the shots combine one or two practical tentacles with one or two CG tentacles. CG or puppets, we are very proud of the strength of character that the tentacles achieve. There are many moments in the film where Doc Ock carries on conversations with the evil side of his personality manifested in the four mechanical limbs. A good example of this performance is in the day scene in the pier where Doc Ock laments the loss of his wife Rosie and decides to rebuild the machine.

We also had to create a wholly CG version of Doc Ock. This meant finding a viable way to produce "real" skin. Scott Stokdyk and his team at Imageworks found a way to combine prototype technologies into a production pipeline. Hair and clothing were also needed to complete our virtual version of the character. The test of this CG Doc Ock is when he is intercut with live photography of Alfred Molina. Doc Ock and Spider-Man fighting on the clock tower is a good example of CG characters freely intercut with their live counterparts. The animators did a great job of matching Alfred's facial performance in the CG Doc Ock sequences. Look at the pier destruction sequence, including Ock sinking into the river, for good examples of our CG Doc Ock face, hair, and clothing.

"The power of the sun in the palm of my hand." Doc Ock plans to make controllable fusion, which has the appearance of a small scale-sun. The fusion event needed to be, by far, the brightest thing in the scene, brighter than an arc-welder's flare. Traditionally, bright-light effects like these are done by layering additive light elements, however, this approach quickly becomes blown-out and two-dimensional looking. When we were researching the sun, we kept coming across heavily filtered images of the details of the solar surface and its prominences. We conferred with Sam and our director of photography, Bill Pope, and we agreed that we would darken the scenes in which the fusion ball appears, referred to as the welder-goggle effect. By darkening the entire scene, we left the mid-to-high range exposure for the fusion ball. We could have two or three stops of latitude to separate the elements that were the detail of the fusion ball (thus keeping its dimensionality) and still have it be the brightest thing in the scene. Watch the scene in Doc Ock's lab when the accident with the fusion occurs for good examples of the welder-goggle effect.


OTHER VISUAL EFFECTS WORK

Significant miniature work was used for the climactic battle between Doc Ock and Spider-Man at the pier. Grant McCune Design provided an exacting quarter-scale exterior and an interior pier miniature. Extensive hydraulic systems allowed the miniature to collapse inward and be dragged beneath the waves by the sinking fusion machine. Spydercam captured some of the miniature photography as well as live-plate photography in Chicago and New York. As with other scenes in the film, many of the miniature plates were exposure-bracketed to provide the digital artists with high-dynamic range elements.

Scott Stokdyk's team at Sony Pictures Imageworks also provided intricate detail and atmospherics. Extensive work provided the movement and dimensionality of the elements that made up the fusion event. Each time a tentacle made percussive contact with a surface, an appropriate level of dust and debris was disturbed. The whirling vortex of water and wind-blown spray that attended the destruction of Doc Ock's machine in the third act was crafted by combining existing software with software written specifically for this sequence. Artists generated the flying glass for the car crashing through the window in the Deli sequence and shatter stone work for battles on the sides of buildings. There were countless enhancements to every visual effects sequence. These additions were essential to the integration of visual effects shots into the "reality" of the film.

Lighting, and compositing were retooled to improve on the processes used in the first Spider-Man. A pipeline was created to stitch together footage from three-camera arrays that were shot from a moving train. We could pan across the seams on these traveling pan and tiles without seeing the seams in the moving images.

The visual effects color-correction pipeline underwent several upgrades. We set up a single DLP projector and brought the artists to a single location to evaluate their work. Imageworks performed colorimetric calibration to match the color and contrast of the digital projector to our film output. By looking at all the work in a single viewing environment and because of the accuracy of the calibrated projector, our shooting ratio for film-out was close to 1.2 film-outs per final.

Spider-Man 2 was an enormous challenge. There are many other aspects of the visual effects work that there just isn't space to mention without an additional eight or nine pages. Many people made this movie their obsession, and I believe the final product reflects their dedication to this film.