Foxx’s character–who gained his evil powers after an
unfortunate mishap with a tank filled with electric eels–is a walking, talking
blue orb, pulsating with electricity. But it took the special effects team lot
of make-up and computer animation to create a convincing villain.
“(It) was like taking me and dipping me in blue candle wax
for four hours,” Foxx laughed as he explained the process to FoxNews.com. “But
then, when I looked at it and saw what they did with the computer-generated
imagery (CGI)–it was incredible. People don’t even know that it’s actually
me–they think it’s all CGI.”
For the “Amazing Spider-Man 2” digital effects artists,
director Marc Webb wanted to push beyond just a flat cartoon image of the
Electro character. “(He) stressed to us that he wanted to see something unique
and unexpected for this character,” digital effects supervisor David Smith told
FoxNews.com. “Our inspiration were things in nature that surround us–lightning
storms were one of our key inspirations. What we developed, based on the idea
that there was an electric storm going on inside his body. Depending on his
mood, the storm can change speed and color. When it’s red, he’s really angry.”
“We were trying to stay away a simple lightening bolt as
much as possible, which was really difficult to do,” added visual effects
supervisor Jerome Chen. “But we found by going into outer space, we found more
inspiration.”
The team created the electric effect by layering images of
the aurora borealis combined with Midwestern lightning storms. The end result duly
impressed the man who played Electro. “These guys are geniuses at what they
do,” raved Foxx. “The head of the CGI department was like, ‘We got it. We know
what we want to do. We want to make a thunderstorm inside your body.’ It’s
great to see it all work.”
When Electro battles with Spider-Man in Times Square, the
pair duke it out on a set that was created almost exclusively with digital
effects.
“We ended up shooting it in actual Times Square just one
night to acquire some basic footage to establish the character there,” Chen
explained. “Then, we moved to a soundstage on Long Island, where we built a
small section of Times Square and then used computer graphic techniques to
basically enhance and augment the background.”
With over 100 billboards in Times Square–all of which had to
be cleared by the advertisers–creating a set that accurately depicted one of
the most iconic locations in New York City became something of a logistical
nightmare for the filmmakers.
“I remember that scene came up in the script and we worked
on it a little bit, and I was denying myself the pain and fear of thinking
about how this was actually going to happen,” Webb told FoxNews.com. “I was
like, ‘Oh, cool!’ and then I was like, ‘I don’t know how the f--- I’m going to
do this.’ And then I was like, ‘Well, we’ll just build part of Times Square.’
And (the production designers) were like, ‘OK!’ I keep waiting for someone to
say, ‘Are you insane?! How are we going to do that?’ But they were like, ‘OK,
yeah, we’ll just do it.’”
Along with having to recreate almost every single billboard
in Times Square, the digital effects team had to rebuild the entire CG set
virtually from scratch.
“Throughout the years, we’ve built out a pretty substantial
library of buildings in New York city that we reuse–they’re kind of like puzzle
pieces or Lego blocks that we repopulate streets with,” explained Chen. “But
Times Square by itself took about a year. We didn’t have a fully realized
version of Times Square–we had little pieces of it.”
“That was pretty crazy,” Smith admitted to FoxNews.com. “We
had no idea that we were going to have to replace that many (buildings).”
“In short, 50 artists worked for one year to create an
environment that hopefully nobody would notice,” added Chen.
“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” opens nationwide of Friday, May
2.
No comments:
Post a Comment