RAIMI: We had to make a lot of the tools to make the tools back in the day of Spider-Man. John Dykstra, in fact said to me, “Sam, the tools don’t exist to do what we’re talking about, making a CGI Spider-Man. But if we start now, we can develop the technologies so that they’ll be ready for us when we need them in a year and a half.” And I went, “That’s the coolest thing I ever heard in my life. Let’s do that.” And we did, and the technologies were there for us.
So certainly that has become much easier now. There’s whole companies that are set up to make CGI characters. They’ve got great new programs in place. The pipelines are laid. So the newest tools, I think technologically that helped me were actually the telecommunication tools, Zoom, for instance. To be able to speak to a hundred different crew members around the world at the same time to share a storyboard, I could have my storyboard artists put up a storyboard to explain something to us, or I could have the art department bring up a design so that we could look at it with the director of photography and talk about how we’d light it.
Or I could, on the same call, have my editor show a clip of a scene that was partially edited so we could really understand where this insert would go between which two shots. That tool is incredibly helpful and a great new advance in movie making.
