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workflow Editor Alan Bell (top) and cinematographer John Schwartzman. duction started in December of 2010. Bell then took over in February of 2011. Scalia left but came back when things hit crunch time in 2012. Mike McClusker also came on board, helping on the director's cut and editing a 14-minute montage sequence down to seven. The editors were perched in a mini-the- ater on the Sony lot. The output of the Avid Media Composer would go to a Doremi Dimension 3D box that split out one eye feed to a projector and the other to a 3D monitor. Bell would check sequences in 3D on and off during the day. There were also dedicated 3D theaters for work-in-progress screenings and visual effects reviews. Editorial worked with Media Composer 5, which required some workarounds to edit 3D. (In Media Composer 6 there's no need to use a separate application, such as Avid Meta- Fuze to create side by side or over under flattened streams. Full raster 1080 material from each eye can be imported and the appli- cation will create the necessary versions needed in realtime.) Bell says of Webb and editorial: "Marc tends to be there quite a bit. He likes hanging out in the cutting room, and I appreciate hav- ing him there. He and I work very closely together throughout the process." Particu- larly when they are going through perfor- mances, he adds. As far as coverage goes, "He gets what he wants and then lets actors get what they want. For the most part he's a three to six take kinda guy. He gets a good performance and that's what's important." Bell is also a skilled compositor and would often temp comp the visual effects scenes using a side system with Eyeon Fusion and Autodesk Combustion. On working with Scalia and McClusker, Bell says, "There' a lot of back and forth. Part of filmmaking is turning over every stone. Here's the movie that we have now, but if we do x, y and z what will it be like? The only real way to know is to start turning those stones over. That's just creative manpower. It's cool when you cut a scene, somebody else re-cuts it then you cut it again and to see how it changes, because people see things differently and see it in a fresh way after you've stepped away from it for a while" VISUAL EFFECTS Like Bell, Jerome Chen met with Webb in the summer of 2010. It was interesting to get Webb's character-driven perspective on the reboot, says Chen. "This is really a love story about Gwen and Peter Parker. [Webb] came with a very organic, very naturalistic perspec- tive of how he wanted the VFX to be and 18 Post • July 2012 how he wanted New York to look. Marc con- centrates so much on character, even how the CG characters move, and that was really refreshing and helpful. His sense of art direc- tion, movement and timing were well devel- oped; he was a great collaborator." Of the over 1,645 effects shots in the movie Sony Imageworks did over 670. They did all the Spider-Man and Lizard sequences as well as the free flying Spider-Man shots where he's swinging through big environ- ments involving New York City. For these shots they created numerous assets, including building a CG Spider-Man and CG Lizard, and making digital doubles of Peter Parker and Gwen Stacey. Animation was predominantly keyframed. Motion capture was used for pieces of character action like sudden changes in velocity, Spider-Man being thrown against a wall or running — things that are time con- suming to hand animate. Chen explains that there were several hundred greenscreen comps, splits, speed ramps and VFX fixes that were sent to other ed to give the bridge sequence to Pixomondo. They would provide the digital bridge, digital water and digital cars. Any shot that had Spi- der-Man or the Lizard in it would be shared between Pixomondo and Imageworks via a shared match-move file and a baked Maya file. If there was animation, Imageworks would be given a proxy bridge and animate the char- acters. Imageworks would render the CG Spider-Man and the CG Lizard, and Pixo- mondo would render the bridge and the water and associated utility passes. Because all the work came from the same Maya file, all the line-ups would be correct and they would pass them back to Imageworks or Pixomon- do for final compositing. Previously, says Chen, each house would incur the expense of build- ing that bridge. While the Epic can shoot in 5K, plate files would be impractically large to do visual effects in stereo at that size. Chen devised a workflow with Red and Colorworks, and found a sweet spot for workable files at 2.5K in 16-bit DPX that had good resolution, color Sony Imageworks did all the Spider-Man and Lizard visual effects sequences in the film. studios. Chen gave a small CG-intensive scene, where Peter Parker and Dr. Connors interface with the Oscorp AI (artificial intelli- gence), to Blur Studio. Other houses that provided shots included Pixel Playground, Gener8, Nerve, Arc, iSolve, Legend, Method, Flash Film Works, Handmade Digital, Reliance, Legacy, With A Twist Studio, Pixomondo, Proof Inc., Method Studios and The Base Studio. Chen notes that Imageworks traded assets back and forth with these facilities as standard working procedure and that allowed highly cost effective collaboration. For example, there was a 250-280 shot sequence at the bridge where Spider-Man, in his first heroic act, encounters the Lizard and saves a boy from a burning van. In that scene there was a big set piece that required a digi- tal bridge. It didn't make sense for Image- works to build a digital bridge, so they decid- www.postmagazine.com fidelity and would be the most flexible in the DI. That also gave them the option, if needed, to do a push-in or reframe on the master plate. Bluescreen footage, he notes, was very clean with almost no noise. They were able to use a portion of their New York City LIDAR library from previous Spider-Man movies, but because they have completely transitioned from renderer Ren- derMan to Arnold, a global illumination sto- chastic raytracer created by Marcos Fajardo, the textures were different and they had to rewrite the code for the shaders. Autodesk's Maya was the backbone of the Spider-Man animation, effects and cloth effects digital production pipeline. Houdini was also called on for some effects. Katana, an in-house software acquired by The Foundry, was used to interface with Arnold. Imageworks has custom tools that help animators and artists manipulate their data more efficiently.