Narrator: In the iconic bridge fight
from "Spider-Man: No Way Home,"
Doctor Octopus' tentacles were the work
of the visual effects team, but on set,
the car and these exploding water barrels were very real.
Scott Edelstein: Even if we're going to replace all that
and have digital versions of things,
if you can shoot something, it's always better.
Narrator: That's visual effects supervisor
Scott Edelstein. His team collaborated
with special effects supervisor Dan Sudick
to find the right mix of practical and digital
to create "No Way Home"'s action-packed bridge fight,
like when Doc Octopus first emerges
with his mechanical arms.
To really sell the strength of these CGI arms,
Dan devised way to crush the cars practically
into what the crew called "taco cars."
When I saw the previs, I thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be great
if we could just pull down the center of the car very hard
and just let the car fold up by itself?"
Narrator: First, Dan built a steel platform
with a hole in the middle.
Then he placed the car on top of it
and attached two cables to the bottom center of the car,
pulling it through while it split in half.
Shots like this one --
Hello, Peter.
Narrator: Where Doc Ock was simply
suspended in the air, were equally challenging.
Unlike in 2004's "Spider-Man 2,"
Alfred Molina did not wear a pair
of puppeteered claws on set.
While the actor now had more flexibility to move around,
Digital Domain would have to know
how to place his arms in the shot,
especially when they held him up like this.
The best visual effects references
depended on how high his body was above the ground,
which varied throughout.
Sometimes the crew could use cables to lift him up,
letting him move his real legs around more freely,
but it wasn't very comfortable.
Other times he was strapped to a tuning fork,
where crew members could steer and turn him from behind,
as seen here, when he pulled himself up
from under the bridge.
When the arms brought him down to the ground,
they used a moving platform that could be lowered
and operated like a Technocrane.
This got even trickier for the VFX team
as the sequence progressed and the character interacted
more and more with his surroundings.
Scott: Jon Watts, the director, really wants to have
his movements make sense and to have weight,
so you don't want him to feel light
or any of the things that he's interacting with
to feel light.
Narrator: This meant establishing clear physics
about what he could and couldn't do.
For example, he always had at least
two hands on the ground supporting him for balance,
even as he lifted two cars at once.
The way he handled objects
also needed careful consideration.
He steps forward and throws a car,
he has to transfer that weight,
and another arm has to go land on the ground
to hold him up as he's throwing the car forward.
Narrator: The practical team also applied these rules
to props used in the fight, like here,
when Doc Ock throws a gigantic pipe at Spider-Man
and instead crushes a car.
Dan and lead visual effects supervisor Kelly Port
wanted the pipe to fall like a baseball bat,
so it had to practically collapse
at an angle rather than flat.
It basically is faster at the tip
and slower at the handle.
Narrator: To achieve this unique effect,
Dan used two cables to hold
the concrete and steel pipe straight.
Each cable was attached to a pneumatic cylinder,
which released air pressure at different speeds.
We could force the tip of the pipe down into the car
faster than the front of the pipe would fall,
and then we'd pull the front of the pipe at a certain speed.
Narrator: But that only took them so far.
During an initial test, the pipe crushed
the top of the car, but not its sides,
so the sides were actually weakened beforehand
by cutting out the doorframes.
Then the crew hid cables inside the car,
so when the pipe collapsed,
the cables brought the sides of the car down with it.
Now, it would've been too dangerous for Tom Holland
and his doubles to actually dodge that pipe,
so for this shot, the action elements in the frame
were shot separately and combined in postproduction.
In one take, Tom rolled over the hood of a car
to make it look like he was dodging the pipe.
Then the crew shot the pipe rig on its own
while replicating the speed and positioning
of the camera as closely as possible.
We track the camera within all those environments,
and we do a lot of reprojecting
so that we can bring it all into one camera, basically.
Narrator: In the end, changes in the edit
meant Digital Domain had to make this a fully CG shot,
but many of the original movements from the camera
and the actor are still there.
We do try, even if we're going to exaggerate it,
to use the base of what he's done and then embellish it.
Narrator: Spider-Man also has to rescue
the assistant vice chancellor from her car
as it teeters over the edge of the bridge.
The entire stunt was broken up into three parts:
the car going over the bridge,
the car crashing through the guardrail,
and the car dangling in the air.
This required building a whole new set.
While the main stretch of highway was on the ground,
this one was elevated 20 feet,
so the car could hang without hitting anything.
First, the car was placed
on a small track to move it forward.
Then it was guided by cables
for the moment it sputters out of control.
Dan: We wanted it to
look a little more natural when it got hit
and let it kind of just swing into the railing
as opposed to just follow this exact arc.
Narrator: To make the car crash through the guardrail,
Dan built a piece of the rail out of beaded foam.
He then painted it and plastered the edges
before pre-breaking it into smaller pieces.
Finally, he put it back together
so the car could smash through it.
Dan: We built 20 or 25 feet of breakaway
because we figured the length of the car
was 16, 17 feet long.
Narrator: The car was later placed on a gimbal
in front of a blue screen,
so it would look like it was really teetering
at a 90-degree angle over the edge.
The gimbal was safe enough for actress Paula Newsome
to be inside the car, so cameras could capture
her terrified facial expressions.
Filming her upside down was particularly helpful
for the VFX artists.
You really get the dynamics with her hair
and the movement of her clothes and all that.
Narrator: And instead of looking out at Spider-Man,
she's actually looking at a tennis ball,
which was then easily erased in postproduction.
As Spider-Man tries to pull her car to safety,
Doc Ock throws another car at him,
which hits some barrels instead.
According to Dan,
the director wanted it to be raining water,
so Dan had to manipulate both the car and the barrels.
This required putting a 20-foot nitrogen cannon
diagonally through the car.
That cannon was attached
to a high-pressure accumulator to launch it forward.
Dan also filled the water barrels
with pyrotechnics linked to a timer.
Dan: We knew the speed of the car going into the barrels,
so we knew how many tenths of a second it would take
for the car to hit all the barrels.
Narrator: Once the car hit the first barrel,
each one blew up in order
at the speed the car was coming at them.
The practical stunt looked great,
but the trajectory was slightly off.
So using the original shot as reference,
Scott actually replaced the car with a completely CG model.
We needed the car to start higher,
because Doc was further down the road
and he was up on his arms.
The car needed to kind of roll
as it was going towards Spider-Man.
Narrator: Many of these fighting shots
actually used digital doubles,
which worked out, since the nanotech-powered
Iron Spider Suit was created with CG.
You've outdone yourself, Peter.
Narrator: But because Spider-Man removes his mask,
they couldn't just do a full body swap.
Like the assistant vice chancellor on the gimbal,
they also needed to film Tom hanging in the air.
The way he moves his body, tilts his neck, holds himself,
is all reminiscent of somebody actually hanging upside down.
Narrator: But the constant movement of the action
made it hard to accurately place the iconic costume.
So Tom wore what's known as a fractal suit.
The patterns on the suit gave animators
the easiest way to map the digital body
onto the actor's body.
If his chest turns or moves or his arms are moving,
you can see those patterns moving easier
than if he was just in a plain suit.
Narrator: For the tentacles, Doc Ock's jacket
had holes in the back of it.
These red tracking marks allowed VFX
to accurately place the arms,
despite the constant moving camera and action.
You can locate where the arm is
and really stick it to that little dot,
because if it's swimming around,
then it looks like it's swimming around on his back.
Narrator: After pulling the assistant vice chancellor's
car up, Spidey uses his web blasters
to pull the car door off.
The web was a fully CG creation,
but on set, the special effects team
needed to create enough force
to take the door off by itself.
That first meant replacing its hinge pins
with ones made out of balsa wood.
The door was then attached to a cable from the outside
that was powered by a pneumatic piston.
The accumulator lets the air rush into the piston,
piston closes, pulls a cable, the door comes off.
Narrator: Pre-destroying cars off-set
was also useful for the moment
when the Green Goblin's pumpkin bomb explodes.
The cars were actually taken apart
and then put back together before being brought to set,
allowing for these dramatic results.
And it was up to Scott and his team
to enhance all these crashes and explosions
while populating the shot
and digitally extending the bridge.
According to Scott, Digital Domain created
250 static cars parked on the bridge,
plus 1,100 digital cars
driving around the city in the distance.
Those cars are all variations
of just a handful of digital car models.
Meanwhile, the cars that were closest to the camera
needed to be digitally scanned.
They do a basic texture shoot of photography
for what the car looks like, what the texture is.
Narrator: When adding these digital cars in,
each car is then customized
based on the action on-screen to ensure continuity,
so the team had to keep track of everything
from dirt stains to the exact position
where a car was originally placed.
Scott: Well, there's a whole lot that goes into
just tracking where everything lives.
Narrator: So, why even bother shooting
time-consuming and complicated effects for real
if so many of them are replaced digitally?
It's all invaluable reference for some very unique ideas,
like how glass looks after a car gets crushed.
Scott: The way that the metal bends,
it's not always super sharp.
A lot of times it's kind of softer curves.
The side windows sometimes
when it's getting crushed like that
literally explode into a bajillion
little tiny safety pieces.
Narrator: And you never know what real elements
can make their way into the final shot.
We kept the water barrels exploding,
so in that particular shot, all that water is real.
And we had to remove the practical car
from inside of all that water and add our CG car.
Tom Holland is extraordinarily athletic
and did a lot of his own stunts.
Whether we up using the entire performance or not,
it's really good reference for us.
Or we do use it, and it's great to see his physicality
and how his body moves and what he's doing,
because a lot of his performance is coming from that.
Now you die.
[Peter groaning]