One of the toughest shots of the entire film was Clown's transformation into Violator. The change occurs during the course of a huge crane shot moving 270 degrees around the mutating Clown character; as the crane finishes its descent, it tilts up to reveal Violator. "The scene involves two entirely different characters of anamorphic size," Williams says. "I didn't want one even metamorphosis, so it's boom the horns erupt; boom the mouth grows; boom the spines split up the back. We did it all in one long shot." Zargarpour says that choreographing each transformation individually made Clown appear to change "piece by piece, and it looks as real as it can."
While the Clown-Violator transformation took the course of the production schedule to accomplish, animating the wiry Violator was somewhat easier, thanks to some new tricks in ILM's digital bag. New "muscle-enveloping" software allowed animators to position muscles inside the CG character's body, enabling its CG skin to slide over them. Meanwhile, the Caricature software created for Dragonheart permitted animators to create facial expressions and breathing movements interactively. These same techniques also made Spawn himself the closest thing to a CG human ILM has yet created. "We're getting some [lifelike] shots that are starting to look very eerie," Zargarpour admits.
Violator and Spawn engage in a series of violent encounters throughout the film. Williams was determined to push ILM's digital artists to the limit to show the impact of each confrontation on the characters. "There are tons of battle sequences, both in Hell and on Earth, but we had to show these two guys fighting," he says. "Spawn and Violator have certain magical qualities. When they get shot, their wounds immediately heal it's an old gag we've been doing since T2, so we're trying to put a different spin on it. In one shot, a truck smashes into Spawn; his foot literally becomes embedded in the asphalt, and it has to transform back into a part of him. Instead of just doing linear transitions, like from top to bottom, we handled the transformation in big wedges.
"During these battles, I also wanted to do shots that had 'temperature.' We've been doing CG character effects for years, but there's never been a sense of temperature in those shots; the awe-inspiring aspects of those scenes have always simply stemmed from the fact that the character is there and doing something. So in Spawn, I either made the shots really cold or really hot-looking, with lightning and sparks. We had one shot where Violator falls on an electrode, so I said, 'Let's make huge arcs of lightning come out of the electrode and hit his teeth and eyes. I want to see pieces of him get fried!' All of those elements make these shots look different."
