The Marvel supervisor describes at View Conference a 24-week post-production sprint, turning the U.K. into New York and a final 47-minute fix to Spider-Man’s suit. Marvel and Sony’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” involved nearly 2,000 VFX shots and just 24 weeks of post-production, with 445 shots delivered in a single week, overall VFX supervisor Jerome Chen revealed at View Conference in Turin on Wednesday. About three-quarters of “Brand New Day’s” VFX work was delivered during the final six weeks, he added, making an already demanding schedule even more intense.
Next, Chen recalled that preparations began with a scouting trip to New York in December 2024, before he had received a finished script. Director Destin Daniel Cretton wanted a more grounded, street-level Spider-Man, with the city itself integral to the story. But most filming would take place in the U.K., where Pinewood Studios, London and Glasgow doubled for New York.
Production designer Charles Wood’s concept art helped establish a relatively restrained palette, punctuated by saturated colors at key emotional moments. The team preserved usable street-level photography and digitally replaced or extended much of what lay above it. Those included hanging traffic signals, scaffolding, water towers and the correct power lines.
Even the yellow markings along British curbs had to disappear. Small pieces of script could produce enormous technical assignments. An introduction involving Spider-Man and a tank expanded from a handful of words into 11 shots and roughly 52 seconds of footage.
Physical tabletop models helped the crew determine how a vehicle should crash through a building when there was no time for elaborate previws. In another sequence, a compact camera rig mounted on a helmet captured Tom Holland’s performance from near his face, with a blurry red shape added in compositing to suggest the inside of his mask. The movie also gave Chen his first opportunity to work on Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk.
Because the character appears in a more savage, telepathically controlled state, the team explored a different physique from earlier Marvel outings, adjusting his proportions, muscular definition, hair color and the relative size of his hands and feet. Chen consulted Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige about how Hulk’s appearance had evolved across the franchise. They lengthened his arms, reduced his body fat and gave him grayer hair.
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