Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546154
www.postmagazine.com 19 POST JULY/AUG 2026 who's amazing, lives full-time in New Orleans, so he was always remote. Since COVID, it's really dialed in to be able to work in many different ways." There are lots of visual effects. How did you deal with sequences that were still in the works? Were you leaving placeholders in your timeline? "All of the above. Sometimes it was just a green screen. For example, the whole fight at the end (of Episode 1) was all just green screen. You can imagine what it would be, but you didn't see it for quite some time. We would temp stuff in. It was green screen for a long time and then we would just put in wind, because you know at the top of the building you would have to hear wind. And then you'd hear the traffic — the din of the traffic way at the bottom. And then as time went on, and we were working with visual effects, they would give us the building in the background or some- thing like that as a reference point. And then, as time when on, the shots would get more and more sophisticated. But with visual effects, they wait until we are locked or very close to being locked before they start to do any real, truly sophisticated work because it's expensive." I understand not wanting to create VFX that might not make it into the final edit. Jennifer Barbot: "It's definitely big communication. We would talk, like, 'Okay, these sequences we feel are pretty close to being locked.' Or, 'In this se- quence that has 20 shots, we're pretty sure these four shots are going to stay [that] length.' They always give us handles, like eight-frame handles — so we have a tiny shift, but that's not very long. "It definitely requires a lot of communication and collaboration with visual effects. For example, in the opening, we had a storyboard artist, Jay Martin, who was great, who would give us storyboards for how that laid out. And then he would tweak those. We'd have conversations about it and call him. He'd make an adjustment and he would send us a new card. And then when Oren was like, 'Okay, this is how we feel it could work.' Then he would give us more cards. He'd give us an animatic, so you would see it sort of move." So you're putting those updates into your timeline? Jennifer Barbot: "Yeah, so that he can see it. And then we're putting music there, and we're putting sound effects, and we are doing a temp voiceover, so we're building the whole thing. And then Oren's feeding back on that and letting us know, 'Okay, we can lose this shot.' Or, 'Let's change this shot.' Or, 'What if he jumped over here or swung over here instead?' And then Jay would change that and then we dropped that in. It was really a very fun, inventive and collaborative process." Eric Kissack: "Sometimes there would be things where we were like, 'Oh, this almost works, but you kind of want one more shot where we see the car coming to a stop so it's clear what the relationship between these two things are.' So having access to Jay was amazing because he would just (say), 'Oh yeah! I know exactly what you mean.' He would draw it on his laptop. You could like log in and watch him draw it, which was amazing. And then he would send it to you, and you put it in and be like, 'Yes, it's the exact shot we would need.' While they were shooting, they could actually go and grab that shot." What sequences would you point to as highlights of your work? Eric Kissack: "There's a fun action sequence at the end of Episode 2, where the Spider attacks this convoy of cars. What was really fun about that (was) it looked cool and the stunts were great, but we were very intent on making it clear that this was an aging Spider-Man. When he flies through the air, it's not perfect. He flails a little bit. He's also someone who hasn't put the suit on in a while. He lands on the car (or) shoots a web and misses. He's not perfect. That was really fun to me. You felt the character coming through. "I would also say the sequence in Episode 6, where he sort of has this like fever dream. It was a lot of fun because in the script, it was sort of like, 'Nic Cage runs through a nightmarish world.' What does that mean? We spent a lot of time working with visual effects to try to build it…It was very creative and very fun. (I'm) happy with how it turned out." Jennifer Barbot: "I like two sequences the most. I love the opening. That was very collaborative and fun. I love Kat Hardy, when she's singing her song. I feel like it hits all points for me. It's romantic, character development, beautiful, beautifully shot. It's an ode (to) and paced for 'noir.' And then it has some sort of freeform editing in there. It's just an interesting mix of everything. And the song is so great. It starts out classic, old, and then becomes a sort of modern vibe, which we used as a good touchstone for everything musically. "I also really like the montage that Eric had referenced, with Ben when he's reading the newspaper. We experimented with a lot of versions of that and trying to make it feel almost like a 1930s newsreel. It allowed us to have this sort of freeform editing." Cinesite's VFX work included the spiders in the dream sequence. Editors worked on Avid system to cut the series' eight episodes.