Teams from across Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) worked together on Columbia Pictures’ Marvel comic book superhero movie The Amazing Spider-Man, currently in worldwide release in 2D and 3D. Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) created many of the film’s visual effects sequences, the Sony 3D Technology Center consulted on the film’s stereography, Sony Pictures Post Production provided sound services, and Colorworks, SPE’s digital intermediate facility, performed final colour grading and editorial finishing.
“A tentpole release on this scale really puts the studio to the test, and challenges each group to set the bar higher than ever before – from the teams working on the sound stages to the technicians in the DI suites. To a large extent, The Amazing Spider-Man was created at Sony Pictures from image-capture to answer-print and I’m proud to acknowledge that the excellent work on our lot sets a new standard for creative and technological collaboration,” said Gary Martin, president, Production Administration at Sony Pictures.
Sony Pictures Imageworks, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, served as lead visual effects provider for The Amazing Spider-Man. Academy Award-nominated Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Jerome Chen led the Imageworks team in producing more than 600 shots, which included fully CG versions of Spider-Man and his nemesis The Lizard. SPI also created several photo-realistic, fully digital environments, including the hallways of Midtown Science High School, a subterranean sewer system, and the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Supervised by 3D Visual Effects Supervisor, Rob Engle, The Amazing Spider-Man was the first native-3D film for Sony Pictures Imageworks, which developed a specialised 3D pipeline and toolset for the film.
At Colorworks, digital intermediate colorists Steve Bowen and John Persichetti led a team that completed final post work and prepared a variety of 2K distribution masters (in 2D and 3D for film, digital cinema and IMAX projection), as well as analogous 4K masters for archival purposes.
Post production work was facilitated by an innovative digital workflow centering on Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Production Backbone shared storage environment. The Production Backbone, located within the Colorworks facility on the Sony Pictures lot, served as a central repository for original camera source elements and corresponding metadata. The film’s editorial team, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Colorworks shared access to the Backbone and were able to draw data as needed in appropriate file formats.
In addition to the post production work done at SPE, The Amazing Spider-Man was shot on eight of Sony Pictures Studios own sound stages, three of which are the biggest in Hollywood.
