445 Shots in One Week: The VFX Sprint Behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day

By Tom Whitfield

VFX supervisor Jerome Chen delivered 445 visual effects shots in a single week on Marvel and Sony's "Spider-Man: Brand New Day," he revealed at the View Conference in Turin on Wednesday. The film carried nearly 2,000 VFX shots in total and just 24 weeks of post-production.

"In one week, we did about 445 shots," Chen said. He compared the figure with his first film as a supervisor in 1999, which contained 450 shots in total and took two years to complete. About three-quarters of "Brand New Day's" VFX work arrived during the final six weeks of the schedule.

The numbers deserve scrutiny. Delivering at that pace means the schedule, not the craft, dictated the pipeline — a point Chen himself conceded repeatedly.

How do you shoot New York in Britain?

Preparation began with a scouting trip to New York in December 2024, before Chen had received a finished script. Director Destin Daniel Cretton wanted a grounded, street-level Spider-Man, with the city integral to the story. Most filming took place in the U.K., where Pinewood Studios, London and Glasgow doubled for New York.

The team preserved usable street-level photography and digitally replaced or extended what lay above it. "We just found basically a recipe of a half dozen or so things that tell you that it's New York," Chen said. The list included:

• hanging traffic signals
• scaffolding
• water towers
• correct power lines

Even the yellow markings along British curbs had to disappear. Production designer Charles Wood's concept art established a restrained palette, punctuated by saturated color at key emotional moments.

Small script lines became large assignments. An introduction involving Spider-Man and a tank expanded from a handful of words into 11 shots and roughly 52 seconds of footage. Physical tabletop models stood in for elaborate previs when time ran short. In another sequence, a compact camera rig mounted on a helmet captured Tom Holland's performance near his face, with a blurry red shape added in compositing to suggest the inside of his mask.

"Sometimes the easiest tricks are the most effective," Chen said.

What changed for Hulk?

The film gave Chen his first opportunity to work on Mark Ruffalo's Hulk. Because the character appears in a more savage, telepathically controlled state, the team rebuilt his proportions, muscular definition, hair color and the relative size of his hands and feet. Chen consulted Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige on how Hulk's appearance had evolved across the franchise.

"I realized that nobody had ever looked closely at Hulk's toenails before," Chen joked. "That was something that we had to do."

The redesign was specific: earlier versions looked unnaturally green, so the team studied how the skin would react to different lighting. They lengthened his arms, reduced his body fat and gave him grayer hair. A subtle shift in eye color, from green to brown, signals the moment Hulk regains his humanity. Full-scale, 10-foot stand-ins helped actors and camera crews judge his dimensions on set. Even his pants required careful attention.

Where did the film fall short?

A climactic energy wave involving Jean Grey proved harder to solve. Chen initially resisted the rainbow-like chromatic aberration familiar from other screen depictions of superpowers. With five weeks remaining, he reversed course, deciding the established visual vocabulary served the film better than something overly electronic.

"I thought it was the weakest part of the film," he admitted. "I wish we had come up with something better."

Chen argued that time, more than artists' abilities, determines VFX quality. "If you go to a movie and you see that there's a visual effects shot that doesn't look that good, it's not because there are bad artists on it," he said. "You can tell they just ran out of time." His advice to supervisors facing decision fatigue: review shots within their sequences rather than obsess over individual frames.

The admission is notable precisely because it is rare. A supervisor publicly naming the weakest element of his own film, and attributing it to the calendar, is not standard publicity behavior.

What does this change for the industry?

Chen answered the practical question himself, and his answer was a warning. "We may have done ourselves a disfavor by actually finishing this movie in 24 weeks because once again we've proven that it can be done on time." Studios now have a precedent: a tentpole with 2,000 VFX shots, finished in half a year. Whether vendors can repeat it without burning out is the question Chen left hanging.

The final challenge was unexpectedly modest. With vendors already finished, a last-minute review revealed a sweat stain under Spider-Man's arm. "You can't have superheroes sweating into their suit," Chen recalled. A small team at Marvel's Burbank offices removed it in about 47 minutes, delivered the corrected shot and sent Chen home from a nearly empty parking garage beneath the studio.

If the 24-week sprint becomes the new benchmark, expect more sweat stains — and less time to wipe them away.