Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/851458
www.postmagazine.com 15 POST JULY 2017 SUMMER MOVIES "I think what is great about this movie is that it was a real mixed bag of visual effects — it's not an animation-heavy movie, it's not a effects-heavy mov- ie. We have lots of projects where you know a certain department or a certain discipline is going to get hit hard. Our roto-animation and technical animation departments were hit hard because of the huge number of shots that involved tracking digital things onto real characters. That was the heaviest amount of work for us, but when it comes to other visual effects work, it really was just a great spread across our whole crew. Every department had a chance to do some cool stuff." — By Linda Romanello Walking Into Spider Webs Sony Pictures Imageworks was one of several studios — including Method and Luma — that contributed visual effects services to the newest Spider-Man film, Spider-Man: Homecoming, from Columbia Pictures, released in theaters earlier this month. Directed by Jon Watts, the film stars Tom Holland as the young web slinger, who is now being mentored by The Avengers' Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.). A new villain — the Vulture (played by Michael Keaton) — emerges, threatening everything Peter Parker holds important to him. Sony Pictures Imageworks' VFX supervisor Theo Bialek worked on both 2012's The Amazing Spider- Man and 2014's The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and has witnessed the franchise's evolution. "Certain things are a little bit easier," says Bialek. "You can build off your previous [developments], your Web technology, even though there is a subtle difference in the look. We are matching this film to a look that ILM developed on Civil War. "You don't have to reinvent the wheel," he con- tinues. "And of course, you learn the more films you do — whether it's Spider-Man or any of the others — you learn more about the physiology of people as they move and make them try to do sort of impos- sible things. You gain experience in that and that's what you build off of." As a VFX vendor brought in by Marvel and Sony, SPI was assigned approximately 300 of the film's 1,500 shots. "We had primarily the third act," Bialek ex- plains. "It's the way they split it out among the vendors. They try to avoid as much overlap as possible and give each vendor specific sequences that play to our strengths." For Imageworks, that meant focusing on Spider- Man during the time he is wearing his home-made suit. "We also did the sequences where Vulture had his Mark II, more advanced suit," Bialek adds. SPI had a team of 163 artists working on the film throughout its production, which began in the sum- mer of 2016 and entered major shot production last November/December before wrapping up post the end of May. The studio relies on Autodesk Maya for animation and rigging, SideFX Houdini for effects work, Foundry's Katana for lighting and Arnold for rendering. Foundry's Nuke is their compositing tool. "And there are thousands and thousands of man hours of proprietary tools built on top of that," says Bialek of Imageworks' pipeline tools. The studio employed Marvelous Designer to cre- ate Spider-Man's early costume. "That tool allowed us to build the panels of cloth as a real piece of clothing would be built, with the proper patches…so you get a really clean model. It was kind of new for us to use that tool. Typically, we go to Maya and try to build it in a smart way. This tool sort of enforces a physically-accurate instruction, which means you get much better results when you actually build it physically correct." Bialek cites several scenes in the film that high- light the studio's work — some being a mix of live action and CG, and others being fully-CG. The first sequence was the warehouse battle, which involved a combination of live-action and CG elements. "The warehouse is mostly character stuff," he reports. "The wing suit is obviously animated…Any time you see Spider-Man reacting to the wing suit inside the warehouse, it is CG. And that's a particu- lar case where we were able to utilize mocap more often than not because it was shot in a practical location and the planning was pretty spot on from the previs, to what they filmed, to what we mocap'd. That was really successful." The plane battle sequence is another heavy VFX scene created by Imageworks, and in this case, relied mostly on CG. Luma, Method, Trixster, Digital Domain, ILM, Iloura and Imageworks all contributed VFX. The stylized web effect debuted in Captain America: Civil War. SPI completed roughly 300 VFX shots.