Marvel Sony Spiderman Deal

In the realm of CGI and animation lies a genre a movies that has gained a lot of popularity over the past decade, superhero movies. That being said, if one company had to be given credit for said rise in popularity it would have to be Marvel. Since creating the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008 with Iron Man, Marvel has built an extremely successful franchise filled with individual movies for each character as well as The Avengers, where they all team up. However, not all Marvel movies were able to be part of this universe. The X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Spider-man movies, were all owned by different companies making it impossible for them to be a part of the MCU...or so we thought.

This past week, Marvel Studios and Sony struck a deal regarding Spider-man. According to the deal, a new Spider-man will first appear in a MCU movie and then Sony will release the next installment of the series. Unfortunately for Andrew Garfield this does mean another reboot of the Spider-man series. However, for everyone else, this is really exciting.

Spiderman Title Sequence

The Spiderman title sequence seems to feature a lot of the things we've learned in class recently.

The very beginning, "Columbia Pictures Presents", breaks apart randomly and the letters fly in all different directions.  This looks familiar to the text patterns we learned in Bridge.  As the sequence continues, we see a play on the use of 3D effects and Sure Target.

The text moves from spiderweb to spiderweb which looks like what we learned to do in Sure Target.  There is also use of 3D lighting going over the spiderweb in beams.  Moving from web to web, it looks like Sure Target playing with the x,y, and z axis.  This continues and then we are brought to the sky scrapers.

Amazing 3D in the Amazing Spider-man

So this weekend a friend and I went to see, you'll never guess...The Hunger Games :-) And yes the 3D animation used to create the Capitol and other VFX was awesome in this movie too. However, what stood out to me even more was the sneak peek I got for the 3D work that has been done on the new Spider-man movie due to be released this summer. Not surprisingly the storyline and writing appear to be relatively weak but visually the movie looks awesome. Having taken Special Topics in 3D last semester I know exactly how difficult it is to make even a simple character using 3D animation, let alone design an entire city. While, I don't think watching this trailer on a computer screen really does the effects justice, seeing them in the theater was impressive. Not because the effects were flashy and in your face but because the design of the city and especially the shot at the very end where the radio antenna falls look so real. If you're not in the business of animation or movies then you probably wouldn't even know right away that it was computer generated. Keeping in tune with the legendary status of the last few Spider-man movies even  the titles in the trailer are well designed and I'm excited to see what they come up with for the opening sequence!