This is one of my favorite Spider-Man scenes of all time.
I love the way the suit ripples in the wind
I love the crazy angles, I love the music
and how Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man waits until the absolute last second
before shooting a web.
It’s the epitome of Spider-Man .
But of course, we’re not really seeing Andrew Garfield here.
this is a digidouble: a fully digital version of the character.
In fact, this whole scene is digital.
Obviously, right?
A real person couldn’t do this.
Digital doubles aren’t just used for impossible action sequences, though.
Take these three clips of Spider-Man.
First is from the original Spider-Man from 2002.
Second is Spidey’s first appearance in the MCU in 2016’s "Captain America: Civil War".
Third is Spidey surrounded by drones in the Illusion sequence in 2019s "Far From Home".
Can you guess which on is filmed with an actor and which one is a digidouble?
Okay, it’s kind of a trick question.
None of these are real people.
They’re all digidoubles.
In fact, a ton of superheroes are just digital replacements
even in the most mundane scenes.
But why?
Superhero movies and digidoubles have always paired well together.
And not just because of the stunts.
It’s because of the costumes and the masks.
Now might be the time to admit that I’m a little bit of a Spider-Man fan.
Anyway, replicating a fabric or metallic costume
is way easier than replicating skin or a human face.
Which gives the effects artists a lot of leeway.
They can mix real and digital elements for maximum realism.
Like keeping a bit of an actor's face, and replacing everything else digitally
like in this scene from Spider-Man.
Or maybe they just replace everything from the neck down, like with Iron Man
and then they add a digidouble of War Machine next to him.
Or maybe they’ll just replace everything from the
ankle down to create toes worthy of a super soldier.
Okay, that one is a little less common, but more often than not
they’ll cut from a real actor on film
to a digital recreation without too much friction.
And while some of these digital replacements are planned from the beginning
sometimes they're not.
Which is what happened with Spider-Man’s first appearance in the MCU.
He was digidouble in every shot.
Both when he was swinging around Giantman's legs
and when he was just standing there, talking.
That’s because he almost wasn’t in "Captain America: Civil War"
due to lengthy negotiations between Sony and Marvel
about how to share the web-slinger.
Tom Holland wasn’t even cast until June of 2015
a month after filming began.
So once he was confirmed, there was a huge rush to get him in the movie
as Holland explains on Live with Kelly and Ryan
“The suits typically take 10 and 15 weeks to make, right?
And they didn’t have enough time to make one for me
so I was going to wear my stunt doubles one.“
What he ended up wearing on set
which you can see in this behind the scenes footage
was not finalized by the costume department.
Which is where the digidouble comes in.
VFX artists changed his entire costume in post.
None of the final version is real fabric.
And it’s different from the suit worn on set too.
You can see that the spider symbol on the chest is refined
and the webbing across the body isn’t raised like previous renditions of the suit.
It’s stitched in, and more subtle.
Holland did some motion capture for his scenes but that was just the base of the digital double.
Animators had to clean it up and push it further with the new digital suit.
Animators like to kind of take things and they like to exaggerate movement.
And sometimes it's what feels right.
You know, not what is right especially for superheroes.
You know, you may want exaggerated movement that a human cannot do.
Lon Molnar is the Co-President of the VFX company Monsters Aliens Robots and Zombies.
They worked on full CG versions of Vision and Moonknight
as well as de-aging for the villains in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
"Hello, Peter."
Even when motion capture is involved, VFX artist still consider characters to be digidoubles.
In our sense, in our world, it is a digidouble still.
Because you're recreating everything digitally.
You're relighting the suit, you're re-composing, you're erasing the main performance.
Everything in the shot is taken over by us.
Costume issues come up all the time.
The timesuits from "Avengers: Endgame" weren’t finalized until after everything was shot.
Neither was the integrated suit from No Way Home.
That's all iterating, iterating. Marvel loves to iterate.
And tweaks after the fact, just make it look more superhero-ish, right?
And looking superhero-ish is another big reason for digidoubles.
As an animator myself, one of the things traditionally that you learn
is how strong posing is really important that silhouette.
In this scene from Civil War where Black Panther is also always a digidouble
you can see how, in the final version, the hands are moved out
so that they don’t blend into the body, and the body position is more upright.
Digidoubles are even used to make superheroes look more like comic book superheroes
as the VFX team on the first Iron Man describe
“We try to get what we’ve been calling 'a Marvel moment'
which is sort of, you know, here he’s really flying through the air and he’s got his fist up."
They're trying to match maybe a comic book image, so the fans just [indistinct].
Their heads explode and "that's that shot!" And you know.
They want it to be perfect.
And with a full CG replacement they can hit that.
Integrating digidoubles seamlessly can convince audiences that a regular human is super.
That means that these “live action” films are often way more animated than we give them credit for.
According to the DVD extras on the film
96% of all the shots making up "Avengers: Infinity War" had some kind of VFX.
That’s fairly common for Marvel.
All of their movies have thousands and thousands of VFX shots, and those often include digidoubles.
This gives filmmakers the space and flexibility to get things exactly how they want them.
With Marvel, they're making it a tool in the toolbox
to allow them to get over some of these challenges
because they know that VFX companies can make things look so real.
So, it's a great tool for them to have full confidence in.