Spawn's biomechanical transformation begins with a searing hot lattice of metal spikes emerging from Simmons' spine, covering his body, burning his skin and forming an armor-like shell. "I called his armor 'beef jerky,'" Zargarpour says, "because it looks like slimy, flexible burnt flesh." Spawn's head armor appears in much the same way, which required a complex CG transformation over a plate shot of the actor.
Readers of the Spawn comic know that McFarlane treats the antihero's crimson cape almost as a separate character an expressive barometer of its wearer's emotions which, for example, turns jagged and ragged when he is angered. But how do you bring that effect to the screen? "The cape was something that Todd and I got into a lot," says Dippé. "Spawn's cape is amazing and beautiful, but we did not want to get into Dracula, Batman or Darth Vader territory a guy with a cape dragging along the floor. The cape is one of the coolest elements of the comic because it doesn't behave like a cape, and that's why people love it.
"If we have Spawn just standing there or walking around and there's no role for the cape, it's gone. The idea that Spawn's suit is a living organism is part of the comic book, so we just took that one step farther the cape can emerge and retract depending on what Spawn needs to do. So Spawn's cape is almost totally digital. The complexity of the cape was just impossible to do any other way. We did tests with fabrics and puppetry, but I just couldn't have a guy walking down a hall with a cape hanging around his ankles no way. "
McFarlane agrees, "In the comic and the HBO series, the cape is Spawn's visual signature. By making the cape more 'alive,' the costume has a more of an H.R. Gigeresque feeling than what we have in either the comic or the animated series."
Zargarpour explains, "Unlike in Mars Attacks!, where we solved the CG cloth problem by using hand animation to create the Martians' draping robes [see AC Dec. 1996], Spawn's cape had to grab and pierce things, and form all kinds of interesting, abstract shapes. So I decided to develop the cape myself by coming up with a genuine cloth simulation. We used a combination of techniques: first, the animator rough-positioned the cape by hand, then the simulation kicked in to give the cloth more of a life of its own as the cape moved away from Spawn's body. The results were so good, we decided to add the cape to every shot."
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