Sony Pictures Imageworks Spins a Web of Effects and Box Office
Success
With Spider-Man
Silicon Graphics Octane and Octane2 Visual Workstations Provide the Compute
Power for Color, Lighting and Interactive Compositing
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Spider-Man, the first state-of-the-art superhero of the digital age, has been created by Sony Pictures Imageworks using Silicon Graphics(R) (NYSE: SGI) visual workstations. Spider-Man may be played by real-life actor Tobey Maguire, but when Spidey deftly swoops between skyscrapers in the concrete canyons of New York, who's to say if that's a human or a digital creation? Hint: he's digital, as are his aerial acrobatics and all the amazing webs shooting from his palms. Unlike previous comic book superheroes brought to the silver screen, Spider-Man didn't have to dangle from a body harness against a blue screen, cape flapping in the wind generator, to soar into theaters and break box-office records (racking up the biggest nonholiday opening of all time with $114 million in its first three days, and scoring more than $360 million in five weeks of release). All Spidey needed was the imagination and creativity of Imageworks artists, who worked on hundreds of effects shots under visual effects designer John Dykstra, relying on SGI(R) IRIX(R) OS-based technology. With the power of Silicon Graphics(R) Octane2(TM), Imageworks artists are able to handle more complex scenes, provide faster iterations and work more efficiently.
Legal wrangling over rights kept Marvel Comics' Spider-Man from becoming a movie for over a decade. Yet Spider-Man producer Laura Ziskin noted, in a recent interview, "In a way it was a good thing that the movie didn't happen for 10 years, because the technology didn't really exist before."
That technology is centered around the 100 Silicon Graphics Octane2 visual workstations purchased just over a year ago by SGI's long-time customer Sony Pictures Imageworks. The workstations were initially purchased for production on the Warner Bros.' feature film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and then used to create Columbia Pictures' Spider-Man and Stuart Little 2, which will be released later this summer. Imageworks provides the workstations to its content creation team, which, during intense periods of production, can exceed more than 300 members.
"We used Octane and Octane2 systems for interactive work on Spider-Man. We chose these workstations for use by our technical directors and for color and lighting work," said Ted Alexandre, senior systems engineer at Imageworks. "The Octane workstations have a high-bandwidth architecture, which allows for the efficient manipulation of large data sets. We also used them for texture painting, which was done in Alias StudioPaint. Again, the machines afford access to complex data sets, but our specific interest was the texture performance afforded by SGI graphics subsystems."
"SGI Onyx and Silicon Graphics Octane hardware is unique in giving us the performance and I/O necessary to produce near-real-time visual effects. They offer supercomputing graphics performance in a desktop workstation package," noted Sheena Duggal, creative director of interactive compositing at Imageworks. "We used Octane workstations to create all of the interactive compositing shots on Spider-Man."
"SGI is very pleased to continue its long association with Imageworks and to have contributed to the amazing effects of Spider-Man," said Chris Golson, senior director, Media Industries, SGI. "SGI customers in the entertainment industry constantly prove that the SGI IRIX platform is the most robust and reliable available, whether helping to achieve the desired, dazzling effects that make moviegoers flock to the theaters or helping the entertainment industry address the challenges of digital cinema mastering and restoration."
One of the preeminent digital character animation and visual effects companies in the world, and a predominantly SGI system-based facility since its inception, Imageworks has been nominated for Academy Awards(R) for visual effects on Starship Troopers, Stuart Little and Hollow Man-all of which were created using SGI workstations and servers. |
