"That took many, many weeks of playing with drawings and sculptures. For example, in the comic, Violator's jaw is very long. Well, that looks silly when he's supposed to be roaring, so we changed the jaw's shape. We also added more bony protuberances to make him look nastier, and made him slimy instead of leathery.
"In terms of bringing Violator to life on the set, you have to understand the appropriate mix of practical versus post work with the creature. If you do it all practically, the setups are complicated, they take a long time to shoot and you'll be limited in what kinds of movements you can achieve. The advantage? It's all there in front of you. The lighting is there, the creature is physical and the actors can react to it directly. When you go to CGI, though, you're totally free in terms of movement and everything else. Creatures can leap in the air and burst through glass, et cetera. The disadvantages are that you have to think very carefully so that the things that happen on the set will relate to the monster being there. For example, if a monster is chasing you, where does the camera look? Where do the actors look? You have to rehearse the shot with a stand-in of some kind a head on a stick, for instance so everybody will know where the thing is supposed to be. Also, when you get to postproduction, and you want to put your creature in the shot, the lighting has to make sense. Fortunately, [cinematographer] Guillermo [Navarro] had a very sharp crew, so it worked out very well.
"With all of those factors in mind, we wanted to use the practical creature as often as possible as long as it wasn't too complicated to set up. That meant tighter shots, like a jaw snapping, a head turning, or a close-up on the spine as it emerges. Those kinds of things can be done very effectively in close-up, and you get the benefit of all of the details the goo and the slime.
"When you have a wider shot and what I call 'free movement,' like a creature walking or leaping, and you can't hide the puppeteers or the cables, you run into problems. Our Violator character is 12' tall. How the heck are you going to deal with that? The entire creature is too big and too heavy to move. It could be done, but the complexity, costs and limitations you'd face would be too great. So in essence, the rule is, when you're tight and you can build an animatronic system, do it; when it's a wide shot, use CG."
Much of ILM's work involved transforming the "burnt" Simmons into Spawn and the character Clown into Violator. These tasks were handled, respectively, by associate visual effects supervisors Habib Zargarpour (Twister) and Christophe Hery (Eraser) and their crews. Because he wanted the characters to transform in pieces, Steve Williams insisted on using far more imaginative and innovative techniques than traditional morphs.
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