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[Editor’s Note: This piece contains Spoilers for “Spider-Noir.”]
There are a lot of great film noir references that “Spider-Noir” takes inspiration from — not to mention Bugs Bunny. But the Prime Video series is very much its own animal, as its noir spirit is crossed with the superheroics of gumshoe Ben Reilly aka The Spider (Nicolas Cage), however begrudging and hungover he might be. And the show also needed to craft a grimy, lived-in sense of place and time that most “Spider-Man” stories, including the “Into The Spider-Verse” film where Cage’s web-slinger with a Bogart affect first appeared, do not. This puts a VFX team, in particular, in an interesting spot.
VFX supervisor Hnedel Maximore and VFX producer Brooke Noska were not just on call to finesse the web design of what makes this Spider different from all other spidermen — although, don’t worry, they have done that, designing Reilly’s webs to be the darker, greyer, more frayed strands of a middle-aged Spider-Man starting to come apart at the seams.
A lot of their work had nothing to do with smoothing out wires or big leaps across buildings in bravura fight sequences. It was the invisible, thankless illusion of making a show shot in LA look like Depression-Era New York.
“We’ve got to see the poorest areas of New York, but we also get to see the richest rooftops and the high-class characters in rich environments dressed to the nines. But also we lean into Hoovervilles, into this real time in American history,” Noska told IndieWire. “It’s not big monsters tearing up the city. It’s very personal. It’s very organic. And a lot of our visual effects work was absolutely supportive in nature.”
That focus on historical details, research, and how the visual effects could bring out real, tactile details allowed Maximore, Noska, and the entire VFX team to support the story, too, at critical moments. Spoilers follow: Episode 6, “Nightmare on a Gurney,” does indeed make good on its title. Ben, wounded and captured and left to the not-so-tender mercies of Dr. Faber (Amy Aquino), winds up in a fever dream that puts him at spider height on his own office desk, haunted by visions of his past and unsettled by portents of his future. But the footage shot during production wasn’t quite gelling in the edit the way the showrunners wanted it to.
“I love that [showrunner Oren Uziel] has this ability to pivot,” Maximore told IndieWire. “He brings all hands on deck to find solutions, and it’s amazing. He was like, ‘Can you guys pitch a couple ideas of how we can rework this scene?’”
Maximore’s idea was to draw from Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” specifically the dream sequence in that movie that sees Gregory Peck flailing through a strange, geometric landscape designed by Salvador Dali. It was the VFX team that figured out they could minimize Cage (size-wise, at least) and create a digital environment that would make his metamorphosis into a spider, if not The Spider, both unnerving and convincing.
“As soon as I went back and saw ‘Spellbound’ our show bible, I was like, ‘We should rework this scene in Episode 6 towards that,” Maximore said. “Relearning and, and rewatching all these old noir inspirations and using the visual effects tool set to help support the story was an amazing experiment.”
“Even in that sequence, we used real objects from the show, going back to the organic nature of the project,” Noska added. “You can have trippy, drug-induced sequences; you can watch anything from the late ‘90s and see that drugs were absolutely included. But honing it down to Ben Reilly and his experience and where he is in this moment, where he came from and where he’s headed… I mean, he was really on a treadmill running through space, so it’s not hard to make it look like it’s actually him going through this.”
Where the VFX team came in was to sculpt the environment around those real details so that everything would read correctly at the correct scale. Even in moments where the visual effects stand out in “Spider-Noir,” the goal is to just make them feel like part of the world. “You don’t want to like, ‘jazz hands, oh my god, we did this,’” Noska said. “But I am really proud that we really did that.”
On a show that has to work in both black and white and color versions, the key word there is “we.” Maximore and Noska were some of the first folks on the project and some of the last folks off — “the emotional support blanket,” as Noska put it — and collaborated across departments in order to make each look and each superpower and each setting the most convincing it could be.
“ The DP and I started the same day. The production designer started a week later, and then Brooke started a couple weeks after me. We were there from the beginning helping establish the look of the show and the pace and timing of the show as much as possible,” Maximore said. “And now we’re so privileged that people are getting to see this and enjoy it.”
“Spider-Noir” is now playing on Prime Video.
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