Spider-Man: No Way Home’s VFX wizards couldn’t see the Doc Ock memes coming

By the time Spider-Man: No Way Home was released, the Spider-Man fans had already taken matters into their own hands. The movie's earliest trailers were meant to be confusing to fans who hadn't yet seen the movie, but they also ended.

The amount of planning that goes into a tentpole feature could have led to the impression that everything about No Way Home was edited out. When we spoke with Scott Edelstein, a supervisor for Digital Domain, one of the production houses that worked on No Way Home, he explained that while the studio runs a tight ship held together with precise coordination, he and the rest of his team had very little sense of how.

I wanted to ask you about it, because it came up in a couple of other conversations. Since working from home became the norm for a lot of VFX professionals during the Pandemic, what has your experience been like?

It is not the easiest thing in this industry. Three hours of my day is sitting in the car because I was driving an hour and a half each way. This setup allows me to wake up in the morning with a cup of coffee and go through my morning emails. I can start getting my kids to wake up by the time the team gets in because they already know what to do. I think it has made things more efficient, and I don't see how we can go back.

How efficient?

When you talk about the leadership on a show, 80% of their day is going from meeting to meeting, running around the building to talk about this stuff. You don't have to get to each different meeting room when you do it all over Zoom. You don't always have to contribute 100 percent of the time while you are in these meetings.

I understand.

I can't tell you how many times we've been in meetings where we're talking about stuff and things are being done during the meeting. Before the meeting ends, stuff is already finished, and you have already looked at it and approved it, whereas before, people had to go back to their desks an hour later and wait for the next meeting to show you.

Was it your experience with No Way Home?

Yes, in part. The daily review process was something that was cool for me. In the office, we would go into the screening room and watch the shots, talk about them, and give notes. We would be in the front row of a dark room and you would be in there for many hours a day. You talk about the artists with the laser pointer on the screen when their shots come up. There are so many people that you don't get a lot of face time with them.

Right.

When we worked on No Way Home, we had probably 200 artists on the project, and what I found really cool was that we were doing work from home.

When I'm talking to an artist about a shot, I'm not in a dark room in the front row, but in the back. I'm looking at them and we're talking about their work. I think it's cool. It's a creative environment and how being together helps you have that sort of back and forth is what you can say about it. I think that the Pandemic has shown us that we can do it from home.

The bridge fight scene in Spider-Man 2 might not have been as technically feasible as it was back in 2004, so what are some concepts about Doc Ock that you really wanted to highlight?

We wanted to pay homage to the old films and so we watched them. We wanted the personality of the arms to come through in a similar way but also wanted to bring new technology into the mix to give them more character. Alfred was sometimes on wires and other times he was standing on a platform that lifted him. He was more comfortable standing on the platform so that he wasn't just dangling. We replaced him from the neck down because he had to have his legs and jacket replaced because they were getting draped over things.

We kept his head for the whole time, but then we had to talk about his weight, movement, and how you make it look like he is floating. We made sure that it was grounded in a little bit of reality. He has four arms, but we had to make sure that he wasn't only standing on one of them while he leaned out and held the car. It felt like he was a heavy piece of machinery because of the weight transfer of how he walked.

Talk to me about the internal logic you developed for how Otto interacts with his friends.

There are a few things that go into this. The inner lights change color depending on who is in control. If you watch the old movie, you get it even though the continuity isn't as strong, but in this one, we really wanted to pay attention. When the lights are red, it means that his chip is fried, and so the arms are in control. Under the bridge, when Spider-Man takes over, the lights turn blue because he is in control of them. When the chip gets fixed and Doc Ock is in charge again, they are white, which is a nod to the original Spider-Man 2 when Otto first puts the arms on.

Alfred named his arms back in the day so that he could give them personality like, you know, you know, that's what Kelly Port told us from talking to Alfred on set for No Way Home. The two top arms were held by Larry and Harry. The idea was that the two top arms were more planning-oriented. The smart ones are communicating with Otto. In the bridge fight, you can see that they are looking around and planning on doing something together.

You can see that with Otto when everyone is at Happy's condo.

It's a little bit more subtle, but you can see the interaction between Flo and Doc Ock. The tentacles are paying attention, but they are also looking at Doc Ock. The guys on the bottom of the room are providing balance, while the guys on the top are following what is happening in the room. The plan is being carried out by Larry and Harry. When things get thrown or crushed, Larry and Harry are usually walking him around.

There are so many different moving parts that all have to fit together to create a false reality with a project like this. Does the potential for meme-ing affect your creative process?

When you're in it, there's so little time, and you're just in this little box. Our main goal is to make this look real. You have these blinders on, and you are trying to make it look real and cool. I think that if you know anything, it's just a movement that doesn't look good or feel real.

We don't get to see the fan reaction until the thing comes out. Watching people react to trailers and come up with theories is fun. You are making those scenes, and you are releasing the trailer pieces, and sometimes they are not finished. Sometimes it isn't the same action shot that will make it into the final film. There are theories about where Doc Ock got thenanotech. He took it from Tony Stark. He's going to make himself stronger, and it's going to be cool.