In
Spider-Man, Peter Parker gains powers through a spider bite. In
Spider-Man 2, it's more about losing his powers and whether or not he wants to live as an ordinary human being or as an extraordinary superhero and all that goes with it.
Being responsible for the performance of the digital actors and digital CG cameras, I set out to take the action up a few notches in terms of the character performance and dynamics. Making
Spider-Man move faster and more dramatically is a straightforward concept, but changing his style of movement proved to be less clear-cut.
ANIMATING Spider-Man 2
In
Spider-Man 2 there were five villains, Doctor Octopus (Doc Ock) and his four tentacles. The complexity of performance involving a virtual human with four Shiva-like appendages was not only an artistic exploration, but a technical challenge as well.
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Secrets of Spider-Man 2: The Nominees Tell All
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As Animation Supervisor, I worked with visual effects designer John Dykstra and director Sam Raimi to blend digital characters into live-action plates, create shots that were completely digitally composed, and layout pre-visualization for live-action cinematography.
I was involved in the digital creation of
Spider-Man, Doc Ock (and his four tentacles) and the technical set-up of how they move. This included the animation controls and deformations (the shapes and volume changes created by the body as it moves).
Concerning style for
Spider-Man's body movement, Sam Raimi paired me with Dion Lam, a martial arts fight choreographer. Dion pulled more in the direction of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; I pulled more in the direction of traditional
Spider-Man. Together, I think we came up with a style of movement that is different, more exciting, yet still says
Spider-Man.
As
Spider-Man flies through the city, we never see where his web is landing, yet the viewer has the sense that he is swinging through the city using his web to swing from building to building. For the animation team, it is all about giving the right illusion.
When
Spider-Man runs up a building, his feet are not necessarily hitting perfectly in place. He may be taking gigantic strides or smaller steps than he should for the distance he's covering. It was the job of the animators to merge the expectations the viewer has of the physical world with the gravity defying physical movements required of our character into believable action on the screen.
In the last big swinging shot of the movie,
Spider-Man swings away from his six-story apartment right next to a sixty-story building. I don't think you can tell the height difference and I do not know why the illusion works, but it does. There are no formulas.
DOC OCK AND HIS TENTACLES
A unique style of movement had to be developed for Doc Ock and his tentacles since there is nothing in nature that presents a point of reference. An octopus is similar, but it moves in a comparatively gravity-free environment.
There were months of experimentation with the tentacles. For one shot, Doc Ock might be walking on two legs, for another, we would have him on all four. This was developed in concert with the form of the tentacles themselves, using, as a starting point, the round, metallic "air-duct"-looking tentacles from the comic books, then going, finally, to the much more sophisticated design we see in the film.
Doc Ock had two upper tentacle "arms" and two lower tentacle "feet" (which were slightly bigger). The lower tentacles had claw-like feet on the end and the upper tentacles had what we referred to as "death-flower heads." The arms also had pinchers, delicate surgical-looking mechanisms inside of the death-flower heads to handle the tiny stuff. Additionally, a whip-like tongue was contained inside of the arms that could be deployed out the end to capture larger things like Mary Jane and Aunt May. The lower tentacles had a large set of feet which could be deployed from the end of the tentacles. The problem was you could only deploy them in CG, because they were so large that the volume would not truly fit inside the practical tentacle.
The tentacles have a paradigm of movement and function. The orders are given by Doc Ock and then carried out according to the whim of the tentacles. Doc Ock gives the order and the tentacles decide how, or if, to carry it out.
We started with the idea that each tentacle would have a distinct character, but it was a bit overwhelming in terms of Alfred's performance. The idea was to portray a mad scientist with his invention, not Shiva and the four stooges.
Another issue with Doc Ock was how his own arm movement would drive the performance of the tentacles. It could have moved like a robotic imitation, but that could end up looking like cheap, operatic melodrama. We finally had Doc Ock's real arms suggest an action, then have one or two tentacles do something somewhat similar without directly mocking the performance.
Also, when Doc Ock walked we debated as to whether or not he should lie flat in the air, like he was in some DaVinci contraption, or stay upright. Again, what felt right was alternate reactions to each the tentacle, essentially letting Doc Ock go with the flow.
There was also the issue of the effect of the push and pull of the tentacles on Doc Ock's body, as well as the effect of Doc Ock's body on the tentacles. For example, climbing up the side of a building, as one tentacle lifts to go forward, the other tentacles have to take the load, and it has to show in a way that relates to Doc Ock's weight, and that change has to reflect in Doc Ock's body as well. Each tentacle has to show compression as it strikes the side of the building, as well as expansion when it lifts. This all has to be positioned to create a good composition and to flow well with the action and incoming and outgoing shots.
Alfred Molina performed as Doc Ock in the live-action plates, and CG tentacles were added later. John Frazier's team paid special attention to the forces acting on a character being propelled forward, side to side, and up and down by four tentacles. We discussed the action and necessary timing beforehand. Then Frazier's team applied force through a wire system, giving Doc Ock the effect of being jerked around in a properly paced sequence, which later fit in smoothly with our CG tentacles.
Ultimately, the speed and strength of the tentacles was determined in the execution of the hospital sequence and carried throughout the film. The nuance of performance was based to a degree on cold physics, but more so on what looked and felt right.
GRAVITY IN THE TRAIN SEQUENCE
A few more touches to give verisimilitude were involved in animating the characters on the train. After the basic animation was done for the action, we then went back in and counter-animated the characters against the shake of the train to give them the feeling they were trying to keep balance.
When the characters were on the side of the train there was yet one more force to deal with on top of all the rest: gravity. Of course, gravity affects everything in all the other shots, but trying to choreograph a fight sequence on the side of a train, and have it look believable, made the gravity problem more complex. Take all of the above considerations and turn them 90-degrees, and there you have it. There were attempts to do it live action with wires, and there was the occasional wire shot, but the second they leave the surface of the train it has to look as though they were going straight to the ground or it is a giveaway.
FACIAL ANIMATION
Believable facial animation was critically necessary in
Spider-Man 2. We needed complete and fully articulated CG replicas of both Peter Parker and Doc Ock for all of the stunt shots.
In the first film, there was not much facial expression necessary because both our hero and villain wore masks, in this film, however,
Spider-Man takes his mask off and Doc Ock has dramatic responses during crucial action scenes that were too dangerous for the real actors to attempt, such as fighting on the side of a train.
CG facial animation is usually done with key-frame animation, but in this case, we really needed the precise idiosyncratic movements that come from Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina. Otherwise, it would have been a quick giveaway that these were CG models.
John Dykstra worked with Tobey, and I worked with Alfred to create a bank of mouth shapes, dialogue, moods, and degrees of different expressions to be used and manipulated in the film. So, for example, when Doc Ock is on top of the clock tower and screams as he throws the clock hand, it is a CG model screaming the way Alfred Molina screams because we took data from Alfred Molina's face as he was screaming.
There were modifications, but essentially it was a process of dropping in expressions from our bank of data and then "splicing" them together with animation.
On the other hand, when
Spider-Man tries to stop the train by using his foot to plow through the tracks, he has his mask off. He shakes violently and there were volume changes in the muscle groups (chest, thighs, arms, abdomen) and all through the face (jowls, lips, brows, cheeks). It was all key framed because a procedural "expression" would give it too much of a rubbery, delayed reaction, and each area of the body and face behaves differently in terms of its mass and its attachment to the bone.
OTHER ANIMATION WORK
I worked with speed-changes on live-action shots, making them slower or faster, to give a more correct and/or dramatic feel to the action. This was also done to choreograph the animation within the context of live action. The digital characters had to interact with live actors, who were often moving at very different speeds or being jerked away on wires like slingshots. Using laptops on-set to composite the current shot (in camera) together with pre-vis, we were able to tell if the CG was working with the live action and vice versa.
Vista vision plates proved very helpful in providing extra usable frame area to modify camera moves in 2-D, giving the illusion of a more dramatic operation and accentuating the action.
This film brought the challenge of creating digital characters to tell the story and establish a bridge between the world of comic book fantasy and our world. We took everything a step further in this film, applying new technical methods along with artistic wisdom gained from the first movie.
