Spider-Man: No Way Home Brought Back Spider-Man 3 Team for Sandman VFX

By Adam Barnhardt

Spider-Man: No Way Home was the perfect film for many fans of Peter Parker. Not only did the story continue the tale of Tom Holland's Peter Parker in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it also brought over two additional iterations of the character. In the film, fans also got to see the return of Tobey Maguire's Peter from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man franchise and Andrew Garfield's role from Marc Webb's Amazing Spider-Man franchise. The protagonists weren't the only characters to return, either.

Characters like Thomas Haden Church's Sandman also returned, and they brought forth some familiar faces along the way. Case in point, one of the visual effects artists that worked on Church's Sandman during Spider-Man 3, a film that came out nearly 15 years ago, returned to help the VFX workers on this iteration of the film.

"Funny enough, it was somebody that also worked on the original Sandman way back in the day. So he had a lot of experience with the sand and it still took a very long time because we're updating the look, coming up with a different approach to how to do it," Digital Domain VFX Supervisor Scott Edelstein tells us of the artists working on Sandman's effects.

He adds, "It took months and months and months of iterating just how much detail you see in his face, how much sand falls off, how much does he crack as he moves around? You know, what drives the sand? Like what makes it fall when he moves? Something has to drive the falling sand. So there's a lot of iteration, figuring all that out."

This time around, however, Church wasn't available to be on set and play the character in the flesh. Instead, the visual effects artists had to rely on the performance of motion-capture actors and references sent in my director Jon Watts to create a model of the character from the ground-up.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is now in theaters and hits digital release on March 22nd.

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