Facing outdated technology, the special effects team of SpiderManNoWayHome had to start from scratch with Alfred Molina's Doc Ock.
For someone with even a rudimentary knowledge of visual effects, you would assume a film featuring somewhat recent CG-enhanced characters would be easier to bring to life than a project starting completely from scratch. That simply wasn’t the case for “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
The $1-billion blockbuster also features the return of the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus . Those villains faced off against Tobey Maguire’s web-slinger back in 2002 and 2004, an even older era of computer-generated software. For Doc Ock, not only did they recruit the same visual effects artist who animated him in “Spider-Man 2,” but they used modern software to completely re-create his complex and menacing mechanical tentacles.
Doctor Octopus is the first villain who faces off against Tom Holland’s present-day Spider-Man in an extended action sequence set on New York’s Alexander Hamilton Bridge. The sequence was one of the more difficult ones for the production because it involved live-action photography from the set in Atlanta, rotoscoping and an enormous three-square-mile digital environment build. It was so tricky that not only is Spider-Man often completely CG in the scene, but Molina’s character is as well.