This battle scene in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"
wouldn't have been possible without "Harry Potter,"
"The Matrix," or even "James Bond."
The midway fight sequence called the "illusion battle"
was partly inspired by these movies.
Although the movie's visual effects were completed
by a combination of companies,
Framestore was responsible for this thrilling section.
Visual effects supervisor Alexis Wajsbrot,
who previously worked on "Thor: Ragnarok"
and "Doctor Strange," explains to us how it was done.
And, spoiler alert, we're going to be
revealing details about the film.
In this sequence, Spider-Man visits
what he believes to be the Berlin office of Europol,
but instead is a trap set by Mysterio.
The villain uses holographic techniques
and projector drones to create
a sequence of horrifying illusions.
Spider-Man: I know this isn't real.
Mysterio: Do you, though?
Alexis Wajsbrot: Usually, the process is,
there is a script, and then there is a production period
where they shoot what the script is.
And then we are adding visual effects
on top in post-production.
But on the case of this one,
the sequence was not locked at script stage.
We were at concepting at the same time
as we were animating shots.
Narrator: To make a sequence like this,
the shots must go through different stages,
with 120 employees all working in unison,
modeling, texturing, shading, rigging,
animating, rendering, and lighting the shot.
The movie's star, Tom Holland,
has his movements recorded in a motion-capture suit,
which is then passed to the animators.
To begin, the Framestore art department
worked on creative references with director Jon Watts
and VFX supervisor Janek Sirrs.
Visual references included the comic books
as well as Surrealist paintings.
Wajsbrot: References on YouTube of cool videos that we find.
There were one where a drone was emitting lights.
We watched "The Matrix" for having a lot of Agent Smith's,
for our sequence where there is a lot of spider-men
jumping onto the main Spidey.
Of course, we looked at the "James Bond"
title sequence for "Spectre."
We used that reference for a sequence
in the graveyard with zombie Iron Man.
With Marvel, we are doing a lot more in CG,
a lot more completely computer-generated,
whereas in "James Bond" they shot
a lot more elements, and it's more 2D.
Narrator: The team also used a scene
from "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"
as a reference, when orbs fall on the gang.
Wajsbrot: We wanted the globes to be actually
Mysterio globe, Mysterio helmet, to fall,
which didn't end up in the movie.
We even looked at "Indiana Jones,"
having a giant globe of Mysterio head chasing Spider-Man.
"The Evil Dead" for the mirror sequence.
Ash: I don't think so.
Narrator: Once the references were locked,
the team moved to storyboard, then concept art.
In total, 150 pieces of concept art were produced.
These were turned into animations.
The transitions from one scene to another
were particularly difficult.
They used an FX-driven transition dubbed the BARF effect,
or binarily augmented retro-framing,
which is based on the transition used by Iron Man
in a scene from "Captain America: Civil War."
Wajsbrot: What we call references a blue twinkly effect,
which is a lot of blue pixels.
What is it that we can make it better?
So we transformed this 2D pixel into 3D voxels
and make the effect a bit more 3D.
When you transition from one environment to the other,
you need the two environments to have some similarities.
So, for example, at the beginning we are transitioning
from Europol to actually a construction site.
That's where we completely transformed
the construction site in full CG,
we completely rebuild it to make sense of the geography.
So there is always a link.
When you are somewhere in Europol,
you are somewhere in the construction site.
Narrator: The transitions were also inspired
by "The Truman Show," namely the idea
of walking into a landscape that turns out to be
a different texture, such as a wall or a floor.
FX such as Mysterio's blast
or the smoke inside his helmet
were created by other vendors, such as Scanline.
Framestore created the FX of green smoke
and applied it to different environments.
The texture of the smoke can be dry ice,
wispy, or thick like a floor.
Weather systems were a difficult effect to achieve.
For this, the team had to work on
the texture of different effects.
Wajsbrot: So, one that is actually more complex
is the snow interaction on Spider-Man
and the building piercing through.
It's really tricky to have realistic snow;
it always looks a bit like jelly or too powdery.
Narrator: The sequence involved
three main Spider-Man suits:
The homemade suit, as seen in "Spider-Man: Homecoming,"
the stealth suit,
and the homecoming suit.
The scene is lit with strong directional light,
which was a challenge for the texture.
Too thin, and the suit starts to show
too much muscle definition.
Too baggy, and the suit looks ill-fitting and wrinkly.
At one stage, we see Spidey in a "shard room,"
where he looks at multiple versions of himself
all moving independently.
For this, the team had to create
20 individual animated Spider-Man suits.
They also had to design the character suit
for zombie Iron Man.
Wajsbrot: We had some very, very gory version
where we still see some bits of skin,
and muscle, and flesh,
which was a bit too far for Marvel.
We went full skeleton, and that was not enough.
For us, it's a big challenge to model
all of these broken pieces of metal as well as the skull,
and then making sure that we shade them correctly.
We also used "Avengers: Age of Ultron"
as a reference, because there is lots of
broken robots with hanging cables
and hanging pieces at the beginning of the sequence.
We used that as well as a reference
to see how we can make a zombie Iron Man
with all of these hanging pieces of metals.
Narrator: The team had worked on
similarly trippy sequences
in "Doctor Strange" and "Avengers: Endgame."
Wajsbrot: The previous Marvel movies actually
what we cannot do.
So, we looked at "Doctor Strange,"
OK, we cannot do all of that.
Spider-Man gets sliced into lots of different pieces
in space, but because they'd done that in "Endgame" already,
we couldn't do that.
Narrator: The sequence took nine months to make,
from first reference to finished product.
Which was no mean feat, given its scale and complexity.