Marc Webb is definitely not a student of the school of JJ Abrams and Christopher Nolan. While some directors prefer to keep their productions completely under wrap while they’re shooting, Webb has allowed us glimpses of everything from Jamie Foxx’s shocking Blue Man Group impersonation right down to something as mundane as a locker.
And among that carte blanche we’ve also got a good look at Paul Giamatti’s Aleksie Sytsevich aka The Rhino. Though to be fair, we haven’t seen much that “Rhino” part. Now some new set pics might just give us our first look at the Spidey villain, and it’s not quite what I would have expected.
“Get away from her, you bitch!”
Oh wait, that’s not Paul Giamatti rocking a Ripley cosplay, but rather the actor appears to be in some form of pre-CG exo-skeleton on wheels. Now the fact that Giammati doesn’t have any of the face tattoos or makeup, seen in all the other pics of him, visible here leads to me believe that his body would be CG’d out in post production (no need to apply makeup to something the camera won’t see anyway).
But then where’s all the motion-capture dots and ping pong balls that would normally be used to track a live actors’ expressions? He’s clearly acting and emoting in one of those pics, so it doesn’t make much sense to not track that somehow.
Unless of course the tattoos/makeup only comes later in the character’s timeline, and that exo-skeleton is actually what he will be wearing. If that is the case, there will clearly still be a whole lot more CG work to be done to add some details on the very rudimentary shoulder and head armour bits, and hide the mobile platform he’s standing on.
Which leads to another question? Why a mobile platform? If the character is going to be stomping around in some kind of CG’d giant mechanized suit, then I would expect the live action equivalent to include some kind of mechanics to mimic that walking motion so as to allow the cameras and actors to correctly track and respond to the movement. But there’s not a single piece of machinery that even remotely resembles something like that, which leads me to believe that either there is going to be a crap ton of CGI work done on this character (which goes against Webb’s approach with Spider-Man by having as many scenes as possible being done by the real actor), or we’ve just learned the Rhino we’ll see in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is a tank with the face of an angry bald man.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 swings into theatres on May 2, 2014.
Last Updated: May 30, 2013
Gareth L
May 30, 2013 at 10:05
My guess is that what we’re not shown here is the same sequence shot *without* Giamatti. What we see here is more than likely the reference footage for the effects team to base Giamatti’s facial expressions and match to dialogue effectively, which they’ll apply to the second pass of the scene, ie. the one without Giamatti in the shot.