Nic Cage dreams of spiders, and being miniaturized. An excerpt from issue #60 of befores & afters magazine.
At one point during a dream sequence in Spider-Noir, Ben Reilly has a nightmare of a breathing mask turning into a spider and being sliced open on an operating table with hundreds of spiders pouring out of his body. He is also bitten by Man Spider. “That Man Spider was basically 100% prosthetic and puppeteering,” marvels visual effects supervisor Hnedel Maximore. “He was one of our few almost-fully animatronic figures, because he’s in a bed. There were places for our prosthetic and animatronics team and a puppeteering team to hide. We painted them away in clean-up–a guy in a green suit, a couple of poles and one blue sneaker—but that was all practical.”
As the sequence continues, Reilly in his drug-induced nightmare then imagines a miniaturized version of himself running past familiar elements, some of them as if they are film projections and others, like a vehicle, that he needs to avoid. Maximore relates that the original scripting of the sequence, and its photography, was more minimal in nature. “When our showrunner Oren saw it in the edit, he was like, ‘Hey, how do we make this bigger? How can we make this a lot more interesting?’ I cannot say enough good things about Oren and how he asked us to be a part of such a pivotal storytelling moment in this show. With this one, I woke up in the middle of the night and I had these ideas and I rolled over, picked up my phone and wrote a bunch of notes. And then, I get into work the next morning and I go, ‘Brooke, I need to pitch something to you.’”
“My idea was, ‘Look, I think we should grab all of our scanned sets and put Ben in this miniature world.’ It was already scripted that he would interact with these apparitions in this black void, but I’m like, ‘What if we started bringing these apparitions in, but they interact with our props?’ Brooke was like, ‘You better go tell Oren.’ He came into my office, I pitched it, I had a bunch of stills and reference images that I had in mind and Oren said, ‘I love this. Let’s develop it and see where it goes.’”
“That dream sequence is, I feel, our time to shine,” mentions visual effects producer Brooke Noska. “Other than it just looking cool, it carries so much weight of Ben’s past, future, and current state and how you’re physically seeing the objects that he’s wrestling with and his emotions and he doesn’t want the responsibility or the power, but he knows he’s got to do it. Being able to really lean into the miniaturized world was great. We were able to create a lot of that with real physical objects, and you believe it.”
Visual effects for the sequence were realized by Cinesite under visual effects supervisor Suzie Askham. “They had such great ideas,” says Noska. “It was so fun to collaborate on it because there were no wrong answers, since it’s a dream drug-induced nightmare sequence. Everything was on the table. If we had a cool idea, it was, let’s try it. Visual effects doesn’t usually get that many opportunities to, from the ground up, do something like that.”
Crafting a color and black and white world for ‘Spider-Noir’
Some of the original plates of Reilly running through a black void were retained in the final sequence, but Cinesite completely replaced and built a miniature world around the character, reframing some shots to make it feel as if he was a miniature in this regular size world. One of the references that Oren Uziel referred Maximore to was a dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound that was designed by Salvador Dali. “I rewatched that scene and then we pitched ideas from it and bounced back and forth with Cinesite. The idea always was, make sure you’re paying homage to great noir films. Make sure that the story point is always, we are a noir detective series first.”
