By the time Marvel finally got around to using the Spider-Man trio from Spider-Man: No Way Home to recreate the pointing Spider-Man meme, the Spider-Man fandom had already taken matters into their own hands and Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock in transforms the film’s breakout star through unintentional comedy. Though the film’s earliest trailers were intended to confuse fans who were unaware of the multiversal intricacies that would confront Molina’s Doc Ock with Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, they also ended up unleashing a spate of jokes that would fool any of Spider- Man.
Given the amount of planning that went into Marvel’s tentpole features, one could have gotten the impression that everything about the launch of No Way Home, from the instantaneous jump to speculation about characters being cut from the trailers, to the rise of the Doc-Ock memes, part of which was Marvel’s grand scheme. But when we recently spoke to Scott Gem, a VFX supervisor at Digital Domain, one of the production houses who worked on No Way Home, he explained that while the studio runs a tight ship that’s held together by precise coordination , he and the rest of his team had very little idea how the public would treat their work and remix it.
Paula Newsome as MIT’s Deputy Vice Chancellor and Tom Holland as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Digital Domain/Marvel Studios and Digital Domain/Marvel Studios
It came up in a few other conversations and I wanted to ask you. What are your experiences since working from home became the norm for many VFX professionals during the pandemic?
Scott Gem: It’s enabled that work-life balance that we don’t have…it’s not the easiest thing in this industry, you know? For me personally, I drove an hour and a half each way, so I’m in the car for three hours of my day. With this setup I can really wake up in the morning and sit down at 7am with a cup of coffee and go through emails in the morning. When the team steps in they already know what to do and I can start starting my kids’ mornings and it’s really changed a lot. I just – I think it made things more efficient and I don’t see how we can ever go back.
Efficient how?
When you talk about leadership on a show, about 80 percent of your day goes from meeting to meeting and running around the building talking about those things. If you’re doing everything via Zoom, don’t traipse around trying to get to the different meeting rooms. While you’re in those Zoom meetings, you’re still working and paying attention, but you don’t always have to contribute 100 percent of the time.
I think working from home has made things more efficient and I don’t see how we can ever go back
I understand that.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been in meetings with a lot of people where we’ve talked about things and things got done during the meeting. Before the meeting ends, the stuff is already done, and you’ve already looked at it and approved it, whereas people used to have to go back to their desks an hour later and then commit to it and then wait for the next meeting to show you.
Was that your experience with No way home?
Partly yes. For me, part of what was cool about working on No Way Home was the daily review process. Normally in the office we would go into the projection room and sit there and look at all the footage and talk about it and take notes. Usually we sit in the front row of a dark room and you are there for any number of hours a day. Artists kind of filtered in the background and their shots would appear and you would talk about them with the laser pointer on the screen. But that way you never really get a lot of time with people because there are so many people.
To the right.
At No Way Home we probably had about 200 artists on the project and what I found really cool about working from home and zoom meetings like this is how we’re doing it right now. [gesturing towards the camera]
For example, when I’m talking to an artist about a recording, I’m not in the front row in a dark room and they’re in the back. I look at her and we talk about her work. I think that’s super cool. You can say what you want about the personal aspect of it and how it’s a creative environment and how being together helps you have that kind of back and forth. But I think there are other options and I think the pandemic has shown us that we can do it from home.
Alfred Molina and Tom Holland on the set of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Digital Domain/Marvel Studios and Digital Domain/Marvel Studios
What concepts of Doc Ock’s physicality were you dying to emphasize in the bridge fight scene that might not have been quite as technically feasible in 2004? Spiderman 2?
Our approach was to watch the old movies because we really wanted to pay homage to them. We wanted the arms’ personality to be expressed in a similar way, but also wanted to bring new technologies into the mix to give them more character. Because of the way movies like this are made, sometimes we had Alfred Molina on wires, and sometimes he was standing on a platform lifting him around. Most of the time, he ended up being more comfortable standing on that platform than just dangling around. We almost always replaced him from the neck down because we had to replace all of his legs and jacket because the long coat he wears is draping over stuff or catching on stuff.
So we’ve been holding over his head most of the time, but then you have to talk about his weight, his movement and how you make it look like he’s not just floating. We put a lot of effort into grounding it in a bit of reality. So, he’s got four arms, but we had to make sure he wasn’t just standing on one of them all the time while also leaning way out and holding a car, you know? The shift in weight as he walked had to make sense to make it feel like he was a heavy piece of machine crawling around.
Talk to me about the internal logic you have developed for how Otto interacts with his tentacles and how they move and behave.
So, there are a few things that contribute to this. For one, her inner lights change color depending on who is in control. If you watch the old film you kind of get it, although the continuity might not have been as strong, but with this one we really wanted to pay attention to that. If the lights inside are red, it means his chip is fried and the arms’ AI is in 100 percent control. Under the bridge, when Spider-Man takes over with the nanotechnology, the lights turn blue because he’s controlling them now, sort of like a bluetooth connection. And later in the movie, when the chip is fixed and Doc Ock is back in charge, they’re white, which is a nod to the original Spider-Man 2 when Otto folds his arms for the first time.
Kelly Port, the overall VFX supervisor, had told us about a conversation we had with Alfred on the set of No Way Home, how Alfred named the arms a long time ago so he could give them a personality in his own head, you know. So the top two arms were Moe and Flo, and the bottom two halves were Larry and Harry. The idea we ran with is that Moe and Flo – the two upper arms – are more planning-oriented. They’re the ones who really communicate with Otto because they’re the smart ones. You can see moments in the bridge fight where you notice they’re kind of looking around and maybe talking to him or planning with each other what to do.
Some of this can be seen with Otto when everyone is gathered in Happy’s apartment.
It’s a bit more subtle, but yeah, you kind of see the interaction between Moe and Flo and Doc Ock. The tentacles are paying attention, but they’re also looking, almost making eye contact with Doc Ock. Moe and Flo keep track of what’s going on in the room, but Larry and Harry – the boys at the bottom – are kind of straight down or on the floor for balance. Larry and Harry are more like the muscle and they carry out the plan. They’re really usually what gets him around, and often when things get thrown or crushed, it’s Larry and Harry who do that kind of work.
On a project like this, where there is so much blue screening, there are so many different moving parts that all have to somehow fit together to create a false reality. Does meme potential even play a role in your creative process?
I wish I could say we’ve had time to really think about it a lot, but when you’re in there you have so little time and you’re just in this little box. Our main focus is to make this all look as real as possible. You have those blinders on and you’re trying to make it look as real and cool as possible. I think if you’re aware of anything, it’s just “that move doesn’t look good” or “he doesn’t feel real” or “this character wouldn’t do that”. But as far as thinking this far in advance of what memes might come out of it, we just don’t, really.
We can’t really see or think about the fan reaction until this thing comes out. It’s fun to watch people react to trailers and theorize about things because you’re in there, though. You do these scenes and you release these trailer pieces and sometimes they’re not done yet. Sometimes it won’t even be the same action shot that makes it into the final film. But you hear these theories about where Doc Ock got nanotechnology from. “What’s he doing with all that nanotechnology on his arms? He obviously picked it up from Tony Stark. He’s going to make himself a lot stronger and it’s going to be so cool!” All the while we sit there and say, “No, Spider-Man is just taking control of his body.”