Still a bit unloved from the saga orchestrated by Sam Raimi, “Spider-Man 3” is not devoid of qualities, starting with its special effects. And in this register, the creation of the Sand Man gave a hard time …
With more than 6.32 million spectators when it was released in French theaters in 2007, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 greatly depressed the figures of the previous part and its 5.2 million spectators on the clock, while being a very small notch below Spider-Man, which had harvested 6.38 million entries. Still, the film had raised more than $ 894 million at the global Box Office.
But beyond these laudatory figures, Spider-Man 3 is still considered the unloved one of the franchise initiated by Raimi. For a large part of the fans, this 3rd episode is a disaster. Overwhelmed by his profusion of supervillains, from Venom to The Sandman through the return of the Green Goblin, he is also criticized for some sequences considered embarrassing (the dance of Peter Parker in the streets of New York).
Even Raimi was moved by it, finding a posteriori his film “horrible” : “I should have just evolved the characters and their relationships gradually rather than trying to set the bar really high. I think the idea at the time was to raise the stakes after Spider-Man 2, and surely that’s what condemned us. “
The galley of the creation of the Sandman
If some have not hesitated to stamp the character of the Sandman as useless in the line-up of the villains of this opus, Thomas Haden Church does not demerit in the incarnation of his character; he who had also signed for the role even before having a script. And the special effects surrounding his creation are in tune.
The birth of the character was for the team of Scott Stokdyk, the head of visual effects, a hell to achieve, the most difficult thing of all the feature film according to him.
(Re) here is the sequence …
“It is difficult to describe the complexity of creating this scene” specified the person in the audio commentary of the film. “The shot was 37TB online, even though the Spider-Man movie never exceeded 4.5TB for the entire movie! So this streak is almost eight times the size of the entire first movie from the point of view. visual effects. It was kind of his own movie, with his crew and his schedule. “. A sequence of almost 2 min “exceptionally hard” to create in graphics, because “without interruption, by day, with dynamic simulation. It took the mobilization of a team of 30 people 7 days a week, for 6 months, to succeed in creating it”.
“It’s a moving and strong scene” he continues. “It’s very rare that for the visual effects, I can work on something that has emotion, character, through animation. This shot is also the crowning of a thing made in pre-production. Very early on, we took three days to literally film the sand, doing everything with all kinds of sand, doing everything you can imagine: bury a stuntman, make waves of sand that a stuntman crushes, and film the sand running on tables, desks, chairs “.
And you, what is your opinion on this sequence?
