BYU trio to take 'Spider-Man 3' animation to the next level
"Spider-Man 3" is set for release on May 4, and viewers should be dazzled by the scenes that three people from BYU helped put together.
Ryan Woodward, a full-time faculty member in the department of visual arts, lives in Mapleton with his wife Tiffany and three daughters. He spent 10 years in Hollywood but moved back to Utah to teach at BYU.
After he was called to come back to work on "Spider-Man 3," he was asked if he could recommend anyone else from BYU to work on the film.
"After two or three months there, I recommended a couple of students to be interns in the storyboard department," Woodward said. The first to head to Hollywood was student Tyler Thomson, who said his favorite superhero as a kid was Spider-Man.
"To work on action films has been my career ambition," Thomson said. "For me, working on 'Spider-Man 3' was like winning the geek-lottery."
Woodward said most interns stay just a few months and "then they go on their merry way. But they were so impressed with Tyler that they hired him after three weeks on the project. He stayed on until the very end."
"They came on with really good skills, and it's so hard to break into the industry," Woodward said. "I knew if we could get them in there, they'd really take off."
The three men spent their time on "Spider-Man 3" in the storyboard and "pre-viz" — or previsualization — departments. Those who create the storyboards put them in 3-D format, essentially making the film in a blueprint kind of way.
The department was fairly small with only about a dozen people who worked closely with director Sam Raimi to make storyboards of the film.
"We met two to three times a week with Sam, depending on the schedule," Woodward said. "He would tell us what he'd want, like when Eddie Brock turns into Venom. He'd say, 'Go for it,' and then would take what we did and massage it to get it just right."
Thomson said the director was so busy sometimes that Thomson had to take special measures to find a chance to show Raimi an idea.
"I'd often have to plant myself next to the director's chair with my laptop," Thomson said, "waiting until he had a moment to look at a shot I was working on."
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