How Spider-Man's Web Swinging Changed

Spider-Man does whatever a spider can he shoots webs climbs on walls and sneaks up on me when I'm taking a piss he also does what a spider can't there are no spiders that swing on their webs they're too small to get any momentum it's also impossible for a man to do this it's not safe the massive weight of the g-forces would rip off his arms but in the movies a man has been swinging for over 40 years other superheroes fly drive and run web slinging is one of the most unique and exciting methods of super

Transportation a good web sling can be visceral and satisfying an expression of total freedom and propulsive fun but it's difficult to get right even with multi-million dollar computer effects it takes Ingenuity to make it look real why do some web sling scenes feel liberating While others fall flat how did they do it when did they start doing it well the first web sling SC was done without CGI [Music] practically in 1977 CBS aired a pilot for their new TV show Spider-Man in the 90-minute episode which bear in mind came out in 1977 how many web

slinging scenes are [Music] there two actually one because it's an alternate angle of the same same swing a swing that'd be reused several times throughout the show the reason for this recycling is because that's a real stunt so doing it again would mean risking a man's life CGI wasn't an option because at the time the most realistic looking CG character was a rotating head it would take another decade for a full computer generated character since they couldn't use VFX to make it look real stunt coordinator Fred w chose the obvious option have someone actually swing

from building to building after 2 days of rigging Fred wore the costume himself and took the first swing [Music] as impressive as that was in the comics Spider-Man usually swings more than once luckily also with no CG and a low budget across the world the Japanese were doing it better [Music] SPID Japanese Spider-Man has several other modes of transportation including a motorbike a spider car a giant robot Mech or his legs but whenever he does webing you can't miss it as he yells spider string before shooting his web [Music] SPID SP spider and then the

swing will be edited to repeat several times the man in the suit is gymnast hifumi Koga most most of his spider swings are safe stunts low angle swoops above the camera except for this [Music] one which gave him several scars and bruises that's not the most dangerous stunt in the show Koga climbed all sorts of structures often without a rope including a moving car one time a stunt was too dangerous for even him and he was swapped out for a more resilient stunt man one that was 2 in tall and made of plastic the Japanese

Spider-Man show delivers on comic book spectacle with handcrafted Solutions as inventive or dangerous as the American and Japanese Spider-Man shows are these are practical stunts so they can't match up to their common counterpart without separating stunt doubles from their arms it took two and a half decades to make it look real with every limb attached I got a call and they told me I was going to be directing the film and I had no idea how I was ever going to bring off what I thought all the fans must have been expecting this great aerial

ballet this graceful movement of Spider-Man swooping to the city of Manhattan through the canyons and it had to be done with great grace and Agility his movements had to be incredibly fluid and beautiful to look at when I knew it couldn't be an actor or a stunt man it was mindboggling how we were going to pull that off how were we going to create this illusion so that challenge was probably the biggest making the film at this point Sam Ry had made a name for himself with inventive practical [Music] effects which Spider-Man still uses a

lot of but practical web slinging has a limit to break past that limit a modern invention was needed the computer despite radical technical advances in very few years computer effects were still in their infancy CGI stunt doubles or Digi doubles which Spider-Man needed to be sucked one of the first Digi doubles was used in Jurassic Park it's the lawyer who gets eaten by the T-Rex a Flawless effect but hardly applicable to Spider-Man for Titanic motion capture was used to create hundreds of digid doubles populating the ship they are convincing from a distance but up close

they they look like this Spider-Man needed to be in your face luckily Ry had a good team John dyster was hired to supervise the visual effects his resume included Silent Running Star Wars and Stuart Little but his most relevant experience was in Batman Forever where he and his team created a computer generated Batman who swung past the frame hung off a helicopter and jumped off a building look familiar three problems these shots are at night not completely convincing and there's very few of them the challenge of human character animation is that everybody in the world

is an expert in human motion because that's what we see every single day and have been seeing for 300,000 years we have to make that character Incredible but not unbelievable to create the digi double Toby McGuire and a stunt double Chris Daniels had their bodies scanned into the computer to create duplicate models the animators then studied how they both moved but unfortunately Toby Maguire can't do this so the team used several references for the animation most of which aren't human such as spiders cats and Disney's Tarzan the way Spider-Man swung really came down to the

VFX artist's imaginations a tedious trial and error process until it looked right tell ho there are a few practical swings like when Peter first discovers his powers accomplished with big cranes holding a track and wires so this is a real [Music] stunt there is a lot of wire work in Spider-Man most of the stunt doubles are trained gymnasts except for this guy because this is not a guy an added challenge is they not only needed Spider-Man to swing around but a New York to put him in to create virtual New York they used texture mapping

texture mapping means that they took survey measurements of the positions of the buildings and photos to make a digital environment and then overlaid pictures of the buildings on top they then added life to the city with CG cars pedestrians and birds Spider-Man's final swing is the most complicated shot of the movie it took 7 months to lock down movements the web slinging in this movie is a pioneering work of visual effects art but it still doesn't look quite right there was a surreal jerkiness to the digital character and some shots he looks artificially sped up

luckily they tried a few more times [Music] the sequel pushes the web singing to new heights literally what we were missing to a certain degree was a little bit of the vertigo that is to be Spider-Man because his world is not five stories up it's not two stories up it's 75 stories up the visual effects are improved from the first in every way the digi double got better muscles a better skeleton and is more photo real the CG buildings were upgraded and they started using the spider cam more the spider cam is a tripod except

it doesn't have legs and isn't on the ground it's essentially a camera setup with wires attached to different points high in the air the camera then moves along a predetermined path using winches that way the shot can be anywhere in 3D space and move very fast a CG Spider-Man can be composited into a real environment way up in the air and then shot at low frame rates to increase the sense of speed just like this [Applause] [Music] another key to making the web singing look real is to make Spider-Man real as much as possible cutting

from a VFX Spidey swinging to a performer and suit Landing what the actor can't do a stunt man does and what a stunt man can't do the CG model does during pre-production storyboards identify what is CG and what is live action either by drawings or animatics which are crudely animated storyboards since the production plans these shots out early the VFX can be better because the artists have time for Spider-Man 3 they had a new challenge how do you fake web swinging without a mask on and the previous films we saw a lot of Spider-Man battling

but we always lost the main character that we loved Peter Parker so I felt it was important in this third film like in the comic books that I've read to have Peter be involved in the battles this is a visual effects nightmare because fabric is much easier to digitally replace than skin a few different tricks were used to accomplish this blue screen wire stunts Toby's actually swinging now with a blue screen behind him he is elevated 7 ft off the ground wires are attached to his torso and shoulders and twisting his body to give him

the back and forth web swinging motion the second trick was straight out of Mission Impossible face replacement technology to scan a face they put a lot of reflective markers on it to measure its topography then the actor would stand in a light stage this crazy Dome with hundreds of little lights simulating hundreds of different lighting conditions that could then be used on the CG models in any different lighting environment Spider-Man 3 has a lot of editing within the frame instead of cutting from a Digi double to Toby within the same shot they'll switch between a

Toby Maguire and a Digi double which is noticeable in some shots I love the swinging in Sami Spider-Man movies but the limitations of early CG and Supernatural camera work holds these scenes back for me the storytelling and choreography is so good that those nitpicks don't really matter but I do think the swing got better only three years passed between the end of the production of Spider-Man 3 and start of The Amazing Spider-Man yet I believe the web swinging is much more visceral Dynamic and real probably because the team shot an insane amount of footage of

stuntman swinging on cables whether or not they used any of it in the Final Cut doesn't really matter as it's excellent reference for the VFX artists this time the animation is very much inspired by human movement stuntmen and gymnasts were studied extensively the main comic inspiration is Ultimate Spider-Man drawn by Mark Bagley his Dynamic poses were Incorporated in slow-mo speed ramps new camera angles were added including this awesome firstperson point of view shot which is such a simple solution for a more immersive swing stunt coordin Ator Andy Armstrong figur out a way to have a

stunt man swing past the cars under Riverside Drive in Harlem Spider-Man is going to be swinging not unlike a trapes artist over cars and buses for real first they used a traveling winch rig attached to the bridge and then they also designed a spider swinging truck which has a sort of human puppeteering rig on the back so that the stunt man could simulate swinging underneath the bridge and all these cars are driven by stuntman too these shots are amazing but most of the web swinging scenes take place at night une effective and overused way of

hiding CGI so does this Spidey hold up in the light of day I believe that the opening of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the Pinnacle of web swinging this Spider-Man has a small difference that makes all the difference they made the suit looser with an added cloth simulation that responds to his movements and the turbulence of the wind around him but that's not it the character animation is inventive Spider-Man barrel rolls through the air does aerial hair pin turns and transitions into slow-mo to hit poses out of comic panels much like the comics where each

muscle is distinct the muscle animation is realistic and still somewhat visible through the suit the Silhouettes and volumes are animated to specific lighting conditions for each shot so that the Contours of the sculpt are picked up in the specular areas of the render just like in the comic book artwork where the muscle shapes are so clearly and artistically defined in dramatic lighting the camera work isn't artificially smooth but is handheld how do you go handheld in a digital environment with this motion control camera rig which grounds impossible shots with human impulse the cinematography is much

more dynamic as we're not always following Spider-Man in the air but giv shots from a pedestrian's point of view or this beautiful GoPro shot the sound design gives the scene Rhythm and immersion accented with web thwi and dramatic whooshes another small part of why this Spider-Man swings so much better is the actor's physique since Andrew Garfield is lankier the ragd doll physics are more [Music] exaggerated then Disney makes a deal with Sony and Spider-Man has swung around in six MCU movies so far except he starts off by not swinging around too much according to Steve

Rollins the animation supervisor for Captain America Civil War we wanted to avoid imitating previous movie incarnations where the wall crawler is hitting all the comic book poses it was about making him feel more real and awkward like a teenager this extends to Spider-Man homecoming where Spider-Man still doesn't swing much but instead hops around like a rabbit an odd decision with the MCU Spider-Man is most every shot of Spider-Man in his suit is 100% CG even in the close-ups that is a computer generated man even if they made the costume and shot with it on set

they would cover it with CG the rationale is that by going full CG they can remove wrinkles and make costume design changes but the lack of wrinkles makes them look too smooth this shot from The Amazing Spider-Man is also 100% CG but the MCU Spider-Man is missing one thing that The Amazing Spider-Man isn't folds creases and a godamn looser suit in Avengers Infinity War he swings for a few shots but it isn't until his last scene in Spider-Man far from home where he really starts to swing [Music] they found a way to bring MJ along

without being cucked by a mannequin to shoot these shots they used a large Blue Screen some big fans and a wire rig to hold both Tom Holland and Zena for New York repurpose photography from The Avengers was used to build the CG buildings tomman Anda did some stunts on location for reference but these shots are all CG well it doesn't compare to the amazing movies I'm a fan of this scene I like the varying compositions and visual gags but the tightness of the suit and lack of comic book poses holds it [Music] back even in

no way home with the return of Toby and Andrew The Swinging isn't quite right the character animation is exceptional with each Spider-Man retaining their unique swinging behavior from the previous movies the suits are too tight and The Landings can be bouncy the final swing is rough the movement especially on this slide looks key framed the deterioration of the Swing isn't necessarily the fault of the VFX artists who were locked into using a specific Spider-Man design without a loose suit good VFX take time so Marvel studios's Breakneck release schedule could be to blame before quitting the

infamous Spider-Man Lotus movie this VFX team created this beautiful web swing [Music] scene extensive photography and Google Maps street view of New York was used to create the environment the suit model is incredibly detailed with scratches and wrinkles and the character animation is expertly staged along with this there are some excellent fanmade animations that capture web swinging better than most of the movies that's because digital effects are an art form one that takes work and creativity the reason why this looks better than this is because inspired choices by human beings were made in the words

of John dyra the computer is a tool it's like a hammer it doesn't by itself know how to build a house until someone puts their hand to it hopefully the next Spider-Man movie uses lessons from the past to create tactile and memorable web swinging scenes auser suit dramatic sound design comic book poses focus on realism creative character animation triumphant score it's all in this scene and if they learn a lesson from even further back instead of losing hundreds of millions of dollars risk losing a few stuntmen instead [Music]