Armed and exceedingly dangerous

Doc OCK -- brilliant scientist turned evildoer in the latest Spider-Man movie -- is a one-actor, 16-puppeteer, 220-animator and four-tentacle combo of handmade cool and high-tech glitz.

Because director Sam Raimi wanted a realistic character, he said, he decided to try something a little old-school-meets-New-Age to birth the “outrageous” Doc Ock and his four nefarious tentacles. That something was an integration of Muppet-style puppeteering, the latest graphics technology and good old-fashioned acting.

About 100 people worked to build and operate the serpentine hardware arms that leech themselves onto Dr. Otto Octavius, played by Alfred Molina, in the spider comic’s movie sequel.

The vertebrae-like tentacles are a fusion of nickel-plated, expandable foam held together with hoses and fiberglass and attached to Molina with a specially built harness-backpack. The unwieldy unit weighs more than 75 pounds, which became a factor in the selection of the actor for the role.

Raimi said casting directors unconsciously knew they had to find someone who wouldn’t be dwarfed by the tentacles.

A cadre of puppeteers operated the arms -- in concert with Molina’s movements -- using remote controls, pulleys, support poles and a frame monstrosity known as the “full megillah.”

“The whole film was a real challenge because in this day and age, when the knee-jerk reaction is to make everything CG [computer generated], we were invited to create a real character,” said Eric Hayden, puppet master and choreographer for the tentacles.

Hayden, who works for the Burbank-based prosthetics and animatronics company EdgeFX, gestured to an almost empty work room, where synthetic Green Goblin heads had been tossed on tables. These days, he said, there’s not a huge call for his services. “It’s a lot easier to say: ‘Let’s do this on computer.’ ”

Doc Ock, though, grew from the puppeteers’ physical “animation” work, which computers replicated and extended. The puppeteers gave “personality” to the Siva-like arms. CG allowed Doc Ock to scale walls like a pro climber, to swim underwater and fight on a speeding train.

It took two years for the animators to build the digital twins of Doc Ock and his sidekick tentacles. Here, we’re talking body and facial scans to capture and computerize nuances of a certain grimace, or how the body reacts to a tentacle slamming onto the floor; strobe light and camera contraptions to digitally re-create how light and shadow move over bodies and undulating tentacles as they spar or swing through the air.

Visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk with Sony Imageworks likens the process to comparing paint chips at Home Depot. The animators’ job was to match every strand of hair, every thread of clothing and every play of shadow on the digital tentacles and actors with their real-life counterparts.

Even tiny details, for instance when Molina’s sideburns were shaved off right before shooting began, can trip up the animators, Stokdyk said. They spent months redesigning how those two patches of shaved skin had to look on the digital Molina.

All in all, computer animators drew heavily on Molina’s idiosyncrasies and performances as well as those of the real tentacles to give life to the computer creations that, Stokdyk said, he believes should be used only to do something an actor can’t.

“There’s really so much subtlety and creativity that an actor brings to the table,” he said. “It’s hard to replace that with an animator.”

The movie, he said, is a success in his eyes because CG blends almost seamlessly with reality, which also had to mesh with the hardware tentacles.

Tentacle-driven spectacle

Visual EFFECTS designer John Dykstra, who worked on “Star Wars,” had the awesome task of figuring out how to apply the mechanics of Doc Ock’s movements to the making of “Spider-Man 2.” As each effects department added its touches to Doc Ock, Dykstra combined those elements into a “visual physics” of cadences and conventions.

According to Dykstra, the tentacles always came first -- even before the script, which hadn’t been released when design began on Doc Ock’s tentacles.

So the crew at EdgeFX, which built the hardware tentacles, brushed up on their Spider-Man reading to get going. Though Stan Lee birthed Doc Ock with his pencil, director Raimi said, the villain has adapted over 40 years as comics writers and artists figured out how to draw the movements and match the personality of a half-man, half-mechanized-octopus villain.

Hayden said he and his colleagues had to capture the elements of that evolution not only during the year they designed the hardware but also when figuring out how to perform with the tentacles.

The puppeteers were in on the game from Day One, Hayden said. He helped direct them to create “movement styles” and poses using long foam tubes “taped to some schmoe’s back.”

The crew developed its own lingo, Hayden said, for moving the tentacles, which when twisted emit a pop-crunch not unlike the sound of someone twisting a bag of unopened potato chips.

The tentacles -- called the Four Stooges by some -- even developed their own emotions and characters.

As the “heads” of the serpent arms writhe and their claws open and close into positions of “fear,” “attack” and “defend,” Hayden said, they seem to take on the corresponding expressions. Lights that wink in the center of the heads of the upper two tentacles seem like Cyclops eyes for what cast and crew came to call the “death flower.”

At the same time that the tentacles morphed into semiseparate serpents, Raimi said, there was a definite sense from everyone that Molina’s character was an amalgamation of efforts from the different effects departments and the actor. One without the others would have been like Doc Ock with a missing arm.

Stokdyk put it best: “The movie is so about the characters and Doc Ock and his mental state and how he is dealing with this power that he has and how he is going to use it, that the effects are really kind of secondary.”