In Sony Pictures' Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s most complex characters. The project marks the final film in the trilogy, following 2018’s
Venom and 2021’s and
Venom: Let There Be Carnage. In this installment, Eddie and Venom are both on the run. Venom: The Last Dance stars Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu and Alanna Ubach.
Dneg provided visual effects services for all three films. Here, Dneg’s VFX supervisor David Lee shares insight into the studio’s latest contributions.
Hi David. How big of a team did Dneg have working on this project?
“Dneg worked on 499 shots in two of our global sites — Mumbai and London. We had approximately 600 artists and production crew working on the movie over the full 16 month post production time frame.”
What are some of the tools the studio used for VFX, animation, and compositing?
“Our pipeline around the time that we started work on The Last Dance was centered around Clarisse for lighting and rendering, with some utilization of Mantra to render our Green Symbiote and a handful of additional FX elements. Animation was done in Maya. Effects (were) created using Houdini. And, finally, our comp department used Nuke for the final assembly of all these elements.”
Were you able to build upon existing assets or techniques from the previous film?
“With Dneg having worked on the previous two films, we pulled our main Venom asset from our library and used this as a base to build on top of. Our model and texture work was able to be ported over in a fairly straightforward manner. However. due to advances in our pipeline. the [look development] did need to be redone, as did all our blend shapes for facial performance.
“Sony has always been happy with the look of Venom in a creative sense, so we didn't need to make any large scale changes for The Last Dance. However, we did end up making some smaller adjustments to try and head off some challenges we had experienced in the previous films. For example, we made a variant for when Venom was required to be smaller in frame, allowing for more break-up in the spec to avoid broad reflections becoming too overwhelming and affecting the scale.
“Wraith Venom was a more comprehensive recreation. The head model shape had changed between the first two films, from a broader, flatter top of head to something that tapered more into two more defined ridges on either side, so we dialed this in to taste with our production VFX supervisor John Moffatt to get somewhere in between the two. As the rest of Wraith is FX driven, this required complete redevelopment. We used scenes from the previous film and recreated them using our updated asset, so we could ensure we closely matched the look and feel of the previous films. We could then use this as a firm base from which to start dialing in changes to the performance of the FX tendrils and the look of Wraith himself, based on director Kelly Marcel and John's feedback. One thing we did adjust specifically for this film was an additional iridescent layer to the surface, as we see much more of this character during the daytime in the film. This gave us increased opportunities to see and play with this level of detail, which adds a nice complexity to him.”
Can you expand on the build and animation for the key characters that Dneg delivered?
“We started development of the Xenophage early in the post production process, knowing this would be a major new character within the Venom universe. Drawing inspiration from a variety of animals, ranging from praying mantises and crocodiles to snakes and porcupines, our concept team started mocking up various ideas which could then be passed to our build department to mock-up 3D sculpts within Zbrush. This then went through a quick rigging process so that the animation team, led by Chris Lentz, could start motion studies within a fake internal sequence. Given the unusual physiology we were developing conceptually for the Xenophage, this allowed us to ensure the character would be able to keep a sense of grounded movement that felt organic and realistic. We settled on a variety of insectoid-type movements to give us a staccato motion with its limbs and head movements that were almost mechanical, as evident in some larger beetles and spiders. As animation worked through their motion tests, we fed this back into adjustments to the model itself to ensure everything worked correctly, before updating to a fully-functioning rig for the final asset.
“Venom Horse, another new character to the Venom films, was a great deal of fun to develop, especially as it’s the first time we have seen Venom inhabit a different creature. We looked at various breeds of horses, such as Clydesdales and the like. Kelly was always very keen to have a large, strong horse to mimic Venom’s stature, but with the added ability to move at tremendous speed. Moving down this strong and muscular route, we start playing around with its gait. Being a comical sequence, we looked at a faster gait in the same manner as the previous films, where the performance would simply be sped up to make something move faster, but this really lost the feeling of a large, weighty beast. We decided it made more sense to keep a stronger, longer stride to keep that sense of power, and then lean into accentuating the comic nature of the horse in performance - such as the tongue flopping out of the mouth and hitting Eddie as he rides!”
What were some of the challenges the team faced in the key sequences?
“One of the more fun challenges we had was how to convey the sense of speed and peril from the [airplane] fight, particularly for shots in which there was no strong frame of reference for the velocity at which our characters are moving through the space. At 550mph, it would be a struggle to simply be up there!
“We also really wanted the environment itself to play a part in this action, and to help sell how Venom finally dispatches the Xenophage for this initial encounter. To help with the lack of speed reference, we leaned into always having something in the shot to sell the environment passing by. Having the thick, dense layer of clouds under the plane helped for a number of shots where we could see them, but, even with this, the distance between the plane and the clouds at cruising speed didn’t give us the sense of travel we were looking for. A layer of fine, wispy clouds for them to be passing through was added, which also could drive some subtle flickering in the environment reflections on the plane's body.
“For our characters, a cloth sim was run on top of Venom’s surface to give his body a sense of the force impacting it via ripples running along the surface, similar to what you see on skydivers faces when they are at terminal velocity. Similar CFX were run on the Xenophage’s spikes and any patches of looser skin that we felt would realistically be affected. Animation really accentuated the sense of wind via strong poses, which showed our characters keeping low, leaning into the wind, and the inclination for limbs to get swept back before pushing forwards to keep selling how hard it would be to move against the direction of the wind. Finally, a steady, low-amplitude rumble and broader scale buffering against the camera was utilized to give the extra dimension to the wind's power.”
Images courtesy of Dneg 2024 CTMG, Inc. All rights reserved.