Prologue and director Sam Raimi continued our close collaboration on the third installment of the Spider-Man franchise.
Our key challenge in creating a main title sequence for Spider-Man 3 was to recap quickly what had occurred in the first two films, and to do so in a different visual language than we had used in the main titles for Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2. The basis of this expanded, new visual approach was to employ a mix of live-action footage and CG elements in and around the spiderweb grid motif.
After carefully mapping out the sequence in storyboards, we placed footage of important and connected story “beats” from the previous two films in chronological order within the interconnected web.
Near the midpoint of the sequence, we then depart slightly from the spiderweb grid to introduce the ominous black goo which figures prominently in the film. This CG-modeled viscous material, the calling card of the villain Venom, involved extensive R & D. We developed 3D shaders to achieve the required lighting characteristics and used CG fluid simulations to achieve the dynamics needed to execute its complex animation. Simultaneously, the music playing underneath the titles becomes darker and more foreboding as well: the music changes from the Spider-Man theme to the theme for Venom.
This shift breaks our sequence into three distinct movements, and we designed its flow around this idea. After the Venom theme resolves back to the Spider-Man theme, we conclude the third section with images of the love story at the heart of the film.
