Spider-Man: No Way Home Star Tom Holland's New Costume Created Problems

01/25/2022 08:37 am EST

Spider-Man: No Way Home remains the dominant force at the box office. The film sees Tom Holland's Spider-Man teaming up with past Spider-Man movie stars, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, in a multiverse adventure. On Monday, the first official still from the team-up made its way onto the internet. It shows Holland's Peter Parker wearing his new Spider-Man costume which included a gold Spider-Man symbol. The suit is almost entirely digital, with artists applying it to footage of Holland acting in a much more practical outfit. A new feature in befores & afters magazine details the difficult time that VFX artists had trying to make that suit work.

"Tom Holland's new suit on the other hand had its own set of challenges," says visual effects supervisor Chris Waegner. "During principal photography, filmmakers decided that Tom's character was going to have what would be called the 'Hybrid Spider-Man Suit'. So for our sequences, we replaced the practical suit Tom was wearing in camera with a newly designed digital suit. His new digital suit is composed of fabric with metallic inlays and overlays all woven together. Replacing Tom's suit in every shot was a very laborious process which involved various in-house techniques across many departments in order to ensure the final look would hold up to intense scrutiny. It was critical to our filmmakers that this new digital Hybrid Spider-Man suit accurately mimic Tom Holland's subtle underlying muscle movements, twitches and physical interactions with onset actors."

The process involved lots of time spent making the digital suit behave in the same way that the practical suit did. "There are so many subtle things Tom does when he's physically interacting with Ned and MJ," Waegner says. "All the suit wrinkles and physical compressions when he hugs someone, these were captured in camera, and now had to be duplicated in this new digital suit. A relatively straightforward blue screen shot now took on an additional level of complexity because of the suit replacement."

He continues, "We'd start the process by matching to the set lighting, then proceed with highly accurate rotomation to match all the physical interactions he might have with MJ, Ned or Doctor Strange, or his environment. Things you take for granted, like, suit wrinkles or compression of his feet all needed to be matched to the plate photography. When filming an actor all these subtle details are captured in camera, but when the actors body is replaced with a digital body, all the subtle nuances need to be duplicated and put back into the shot."

What did you think of Spider-Man's new suit in Spider-Man: No Way Home? Let us know in the comments. Spider-Man: No Way Home is now playing in theaters.

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