‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ VFX supervisor explains how Lizard and Sandman were brought back

The Spider-Man: No Way Home film brought prior versions of Peter Parker and the people he fought back together in 2021 and now, an effects supervisor on the project has revealed some of these returning actors never actually never set foot once on the movie’s set.

We didn’t really have access to Rhys Ifans or Thomas Hayden Church, so we actually ended up using footage from the previous films and manipulating it. So Rhys Ifans, when he’s healing, we actually used an outtake and that was shot on film, scanned at high resolution, tracked and body tracked, everything. So ultimately, it ended up being a lot of that CG, especially for Thomas Hayden Church when he’s transforming. We had to manipulate it to get him into the scene lighting-wise, and all sorts of things like that.

Artist Kelly Port revealed the information while speaking to the Corridor Crew YouTube channel yesterday. Port was there to break down the visuals of films he worked on. He also revealed that the details of particular shots, like the one from the film’s trailers which hinted at Andrew Garfield being in the film, were an easy change to make when marketing a piece.

We literally just remove them from the renders, and if there’s shadows we have to account for those so I just removed the Andrew and Tobey layer.

That’s cinema. Spider-Man: No Way Home is available to rent on YouTube now and more films featuring the character are in development. Indeed, in January we reported current wall-crawler Tom Holland hinted at many more of them.