Spider-Man: No Way Home
Luma, Melbourne | lighting
For the latter first half of 2021 I started working on my third Spiderman film. Luma was tasked with creating two variations of the Spiderman suit (red and black) so I was asked to set up the look dev light rig, based on a reference shoot of the practical stand-in suits on set. Unfortunately there were some oversights in the actual reference assets delivered to us, so I spent fair amount of time devising and tuning a feedback loop between Nuke and Katana/Arnold that would allow us to refine lights spatially and profile wise in order to manually match the reference imagery taken from each camera position. In the end we managed a good reconstruction of what apparently existed on set, and were able to deliver a solid light rig to all studios involved despite such a shaky start.
For actual shot work I set up the light rig for the Brooklyn Bridge sequence which involved combining the practical lights from the stage shoot with Holland and Zendaya, and tying it in with the outdoor light rig matching the helicopter and bridge wide shot, the only plate used. Besides the wide, all shots have the surrounding buildings as full CG, and the background buildings as camera projections with a skydome. On all shots the Spiderman digi-double is match lit to the plate as his eyes definitely get replaced for facial expressions, and when closer to camera likely full CG as the micro details in the suit were preferable to the real thing.
I also set up the outdoor light rig on the power line sequence for dusk and night variations. Since this was very similar to the forest lighting we did on Those Who Wish Me Dead there were no big surprises, mostly a matter of client adjustments and troubleshooting large poly count scenes. There were other challenges mostly involving electrical creatures which i started testing but didn't complete as this coincided with my decision to return back to Animal Logic, a studio much closer to home.
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