…..
[Red Studio]
The cafeteria set looked deceptively ordinary - round tables, plastic trays, a counter stacked with identical cartons of milk and fruit cups.
But for Regal, this was the battleground for one of the most memorable beats in Peter Parker's story.
Andrew sat at one of the tables, shoulders hunched, fiddling with the edge of his script while a makeup artist dabbed at his temple. He looked unconvinced - half amused, half resigned.
Regal crouched beside the tray of cups, gesturing with his hands as he explained the setup to the props master and Andrew at the same time.
"...well, there you have it." Regal said, tapping the table like he was laying down a bet. "As I said, no rigs, no wires, or green screen. You catch them as they fall, for real."
Andrew raised his eyebrows. "Wasnt that supposed to be a joke?"
The crew chuckled.
Regal smirked, unfazed. "Not this time… The most I can do is to stick a tiny adhesive on the bottom of each cup so they don't go bouncing off the tray, and they are empty, so they won't weigh you down."
"The trick isn't superhuman reflexes, it's simple luck. We just keep going until we nail it."
Andrew leaned back in his chair, arms folded. "So basically you are asking me to embarrass myself fifty times until one of them doesn't look like absolute trash."
"Maybe seventy…" Regal shot back, deadpan.
That got another laugh from the grips nearby.
Immediately, the first assistant director clapped the slate and called out the scene number. The cafeteria filled with quiet anticipation.
Crew leaned forward in their chairs. Extras sat frozen with trays, waiting. The prop team loaded the cups onto the tray in front of Andrew.
"Camera one, rolling. Camera two, rolling." the DP announced.
Regal stepped back, eyes narrowing as he focused on Andrew. "Remember - don't think about it and just react."
Andrew exhaled sharply through his nose, muttering something under his breath.
"Action!"
From the corner of the set, an extra stumbled 'accidentally' into Andrew's shoulder, sending the tray tilting. Cups slid forward in a sudden cascade.
Andrew's hands shot out, quick and awkward - he grabbed one, then another, but the third slipped through his fingers and clattered to the linoleum.
"Cut!" Regal called, though he was smiling. "Not bad but a reset."
Andrew groaned, running a hand down his face. "This is going to be a long day."
….
It was.
Take after take, the cups rained down in chaotic little avalanches.
Sometimes Andrew froze, sometimes he overreached and knocked more over - the sound of cups hitting the floor became a kind of background music.
By the fifteenth attempt, his hair was a mess, and his patience thinner than the adhesive on the props. "You do realize Spider-Man is supposed to have reflexes, right? Because right now I look like a sleep-deprived barista."
Regal, perched behind the monitor, didn't look bothered. "That's the point, we are building the moment and the one time you nail it… really nail it…. It will look authentic, because it is shot with authenticity."
Andrew squinted at him, skeptical but grudgingly respectful. "You are sadistic, you know that?"
"Directors call it persistence." Regal replied.
By the twenty-seventh take, something shifted.
Andrew stopped overthinking. The tray jolted, cups slid, and his hands darted out in a blur - one, two, three, four - all caught in a rhythm that looked almost too smooth to be staged. The set went dead silent, every crew member leaning in as the last cup settled perfectly in the tray.
Andrew froze, blinking down at it. "...Holy shit."
Regal leapt up from the monitor, clapping once, sharp and loud. "That's it… you really did it?!!"
The crew erupted in cheers and applause, someone banged a spoon on a table, and the sound guy whooped.
Andrew let out a disbelieving laugh, holding the tray up like a trophy. "Why are you so surprised? Anyway never, again am I doing something like this…"
"Relax…." Regal grinned, striding over. "The reason I was so surprised was because you only took twenty-seven tries. I was imagining something over 100 times."
Andrew rolled his eyes, still smiling despite himself. "I am sending you my chiropractor bill."
The scene wrapped, but the energy lingered - crew buzzing, extras whispering about how it looked.
And Regal, watching it all, felt that same quiet certainty he always did when a gamble paid off: real beats computer every time.
…..
Regal had to admit it.
Despite the rigorous planning and preparation - just like today - stunt days were patience and violence in equal measure.
A typical morning would start with rigging checks, then a slow upramp to full-energy passes so the operators could build muscle memory with the stereo rigs.
The trick wasn't just safety - though that came first - it was timing depth with motion.
The human part is as simple as shoes and sweat.
Andrew Garfield asked to do pieces of action where it was safe - a slide across polished tile, the first beat of a vault - because it changed how he breathed in the next line.
Harness days bruise everyone; you build in extra time for wardrobe resets because tape and nylon rub the suit raw.
The rigging crew learns his pace and he learns theirs so no one has to shout over the city.
It's the texture you feel when a performer lands, not like a CG marionette but like a person who has just spent fifteen seconds doing something that would terrify the rest of us.
Stereographers would set conservative interaxials for fast moves to dodge miniaturization, then open the separation for static beats so you could feel air between Spider-Man and the skyline.
It's a matter of inches: change convergence by a hair at the wrong moment and the audience flinches instead of leaning in.
The reward for getting it right is the shot where he threads a gap between two cars and the 3D opens up, not as a gimmick, but as a physical sensation.
….
However, he could have a breathing space while filming other scenes -
The whole filming was split cleanly between Los Angeles builds and New York exteriors.
The New York unit had two weeks earmarked for footprint work: Gwen Stacy's family home exterior at 15 West 81st Street on the Upper West Side, the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House standing in for NYPD headquarters, and the Riverside Drive Viaduct for a web-swinging run.
Those addresses mattered not for tourism, but because every facade gives you different light and scale; you shoot a superhero differently when a real city resists you with its stone and iron.
Back in L.A., stages carried the weight of sewers, school corridors, and lab sets with ceiling pieces strong enough to take wire loads - so the actor and the stunt double could share space with real fixtures rather than green-void abstractions.
….
Data wrangling in native 3D is its own production.
Each take generated dual 5K R3D streams plus on-set viewing proxies.
3ality's image processing stabilized the relationship between the pair in real time, and the DITs lived in a forest of monitors: scopes to catch mismatched blacks across the mirror, split-pane viewers to look for keystone shifts, and a depth budget always at the edge of the frame.
The show LUTs gave editorial a consistent look while preserving raw latitude, and every piece of on-set metadata - lens IDs, interaxial, toe-in, mirror angle - rode along with the dailies because our VFX vendors would have to recreate the stereo geometry to the millimeter.
That rigor paid forward into post, where a Mistika system could take those dual streams, apply the same show decisions, and prepare shots for depth tweaks without throwing color under the bus.
….
Visual effects were pipeline rather than magic tricks.
Like usual - Unique FX Studio took the major clips, with key sequences farmed out to partners, but the central philosophy stayed the same: real plates when possible, CG only where reality couldn't scale.
….
The editorial-to-DI handoff was unusually integrated for a stereo show.
Offline work lived in Avid for speed, but the finishing pipeline converged at Red Studio.
There, a team of 3D convergence pass moved from Mistika directly into a Baselight color session via a custom bridge, so the colorist could make creative choices with the final depth in view rather than grading a proxy and praying it survived.
Final conform ran through Autodesk Smoke, which was as much about keeping editorial logic intact as it was about laying down the last effects and depth trims.
Many VFX renders arrived at 2.5K per eye.
Colorworks up-rezzed to 4K for the DI with minimal degradation, because the 5K capture and careful optical profiles gave them clean detail to work with.
That last fact saved us repeatedly when re-framing a plate to sell a swing or to align a composite; starting from oversampled images meant those little corrections didn't cook the pixels.
….
For IMAX deliveries we prepared an expanded-ratio version of the climax, opening the image vertically to let the skyline and the tower geometry play taller.
When Spider-Man climbs, the move from 2.39:1 to a broader window gives you more rungs under his hands and more air beneath his feet, and in stereo that extra headroom becomes a pressure you sense at the edges of the frame.
The process mixed additional depth trims for that version so that seats in the front rows wouldn't be punished by aggressive negative parallax.
….
Overall, the days themselves had a rhythm.
Mondays favored interiors so the crew could recover from weekend turns; midweek nights were for exteriors that required lock-ups and patience.
Second unit often ran in parallel, poaching an operator and a rig to chase inserts: a gloved hand slapping mortar, a boot landing on a cornice, an anchor wire going taut.
Those inserts mattered more than glamour because they bought us continuity of force - every step, every swing loaded into the next beat. The stunt team and camera department became one organism.
Operators learned the feel of a pendulum coming home; grips learned to hear the stereo techs calling convergence and know when a move could push deeper.
The AD's watch tallied setups, but the more important metric was how many beats felt true.
….
By day forty, it is purely Regal's energy and commitment - that is keeping the team together.
There are days that exist purely to manage fatigue.
You call slower setups after brutal night shoots, not as charity, but because a stereo show punishes sloppiness and tired eyes make bad depth calls.
There are days you cancel because Manhattan weather refuses to match a plate you shot a week earlier and the continuity would cost you more in post than you would save in schedule.
It's not romance or arithmetic.
And it's why the film keeps its footing even when spectacle threatens to run away with it.
.
….
[To be continued…]
★─────⇌•★•⇋─────★
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