Spider-Man: No Way Home’s Jon Watts Performed Motion Reference Clips for Sandman

Spider-Man: No Way Home hit theaters in December, and it’s already one of the most successful movies ever made. The MCU film recently surpassed Avatar to become the third-highest grossing movie at the domestic box office, and fans are eager to finally be able to watch the movie at home. In honor of the movie’s success, ComicBook.com‘s Adam Barnhardt recently spoke with Digital Domain’s VFX Supervisor, Scott Edelstein, who just earned an Oscar nomination for Best Achievement in Visual Effects for his work on No Way Home. In the new movie, many actors from past Spider-Man films returned to play their parts. However, some footage was reused for Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and Lizard (Rhys Ifans), who weren’t as involved as the other returning villains. During the chat, Edelstein revealed that director Jon Watts actually stood in for Chruch at times.

“Starting from set, when they’re shooting, they have a stand-in that is there for eyelines, for the camera blocking, all that kind of stuff. But his actual facial performance, his body performance isn’t necessarily what they’re going to keep. So most of the time what we’re going to do is paint him out of the plate, if he’s there at all. And then we have multiple different things after that show us what Sandman could potentially be. Sometimes it’s the director himself, John Watts actually shot reference of himself doing the body performances, and the kind of facial like performance that he wanted the character to have. And so we would have that reference,” Edelstein revealed.

“They did do a shoot on a mocap set where they got a body actor to perform so that we would have mocap of what those performances would be, if that’s what they were going to use. And then, like you said, we had the voiceover of Thomas Hayden Church giving the lines. And so most of the time, what it ended up being is the animators just literally hand keyframing everything. From the body performance to the facial performance to match the voice and all of that. So that all goes underneath the character. And then on top of that, you sim all the sand and you add in all the breaking sand and the sand falling off of him and all that.” 

Spider-Man: No Way Home is still playing in theaters.