Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/78511
director's chair Sony Pictures Imageworks was the film's main visual effects house. great attitude. We shot it all on Red Epics attached to 3ality rigs." POST: How tough was the shoot? WEBB: "It was a lot of work and long, but it went pretty smoothly, and we were on schedule. We had enough testing stages early on in terms of all the equipment that we never really ran into any problems. It was pretty intense, but well organized." POST: How long was post, and do you like the post process? WEBB: "I love it. When I started off, I was an editor. My very first job in the business was re-cutting music videos for labels and doing documentaries and EPKs, so it's a process that I'm very familiar with and understand the power of. So I feel very much at home in an edit bay, which is good since we've spent about a year on post so far. Even though we tried to capture as much of the stunt work in-camera as possible, there's still a lot of visual effects shots to deal with." POST: The film was edited by Alan Bell, Pietro Scalia and Mike McCusker. Tell us how it worked. WEBB: "I normally work with Alan Bell, and he cut my last film but he was busy doing Water for Elephants, so Pietro Scalia came in and worked through production doing a lot of the foundational work. Then Alan became available and Pietro had to go and do Prometheus, and then he came back and finished it up with Alan and I. And Mike McCusker cut a few sequences. "We cut it all on Avid in offices next to the Sony lot, and of course we had all these 16 Post • August 2012 massive sequences and tons of visual effects, so it worked out great that we had this really accomplished team of editors." POST: Where did you do the post? WEBB: "On the Sony lot, with a great Sony team led by John Naveira." POST: There are obviously a huge number of visual effects shots in the film. How many are there, who did them and what was your approach to dealing with them? WEBB: "We have over 1,600, so it's a lot, even though a lot are rig removal and painting out background stuff. Most of the VFX were done at Sony Imageworks, with Jerome Chen as our VFX supervisor, and he did a fantastic job. Then we also farmed out various orders to Pixomondo, Pixel Playground, Method, as there was so much. "I'd guess we ended up employing over 3,000 people on the film, and many of those were animators, lighting compositors and so on. The visual effects side of it is like making a whole other film once you've finished the actual shoot. It's interesting because they call it post, but we actually started a lot of that stuff before we were even in production. So post now really bleeds over into production, whether it's previs or shooting plates and creating environments, because it's an incred- ibly demanding schedule in terms of all the rendering and so on. "In terms of my approach to all the visual effects, what was most important to me was having the movie feel more realistic, emotion- ally and physically. That was key from the start, to do as much as we could in-camera. We had www.postmagazine.com this amazing, very dedicated stunt team, led by Andy Armstrong. He designed a lot of the wire rigs and swinging we used, especially in the first half of the film. And once we could see what it was like for a human being to be swung around the city on wires, we used all that information to inform the animation in the second half, when we embraced more traditional CG animation techniques. "I wanted there to be this sense of realism, the imperfection in the body form, to make it feel more grounded — wrinkles in the suit and so on. That level of detail was something Jerome and I discussed right from the start, and which we used as a foundation of realism in all the visual effects, so it wouldn't cut between the two worlds." POST: What was the most difficult VFX sequence and why? WEBB: "The big bridge sequence was tough as we shot on stages, we shot back- ground plates, we shot in New York and on the Universal backlot — so we had eight dif- ferent sets and elements combined with a ton of visual effects. But what was crucial was that it's a key emotional scene for Spider-Man, where he has an epiphany and he's trans- formed. That kind of action, that has serious emotional stakes, is the best there is. So despite all the spectacle, peril and dynamism, you have to focus on the character." POST: Can you talk about the importance of music and sound? WEBB: "It's huge. For instance, what James Horner did in the basketball sequence made it funny in a way that would never have worked just visually. It helped cue the audi- ence into the tone and gave that scene a rhythm and feel that's pretty magical. Music can be overused, but it can access powerful emotions that nothing else can, and similarly, sound effects are key in building tension. "There's a scene where Gwen is hiding in the closet and the Lizard comes in, and it's photo- graphed very simply. But it relies very heavily on sound effects and music, which are also quite simple, but they tell the story. We did the mix on the lot with Paul Massey and Dave Adair, and that's a blast for me. And very early on the team began work on all the web-shooting sounds and the Lizard's roars and sounds." POST: How about the DI? WEBB: "We did it at Sony, and it was vital for 3D. I wanted to declare war on the murkiness of 3D, and correct the overall luminance of the picture for the best possible 3D experience. We designed the environments to have more prac- tical lights, as we shot a lot at night, and it turned out great. The film evolves as you make it, but I'm so happy with the results."