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The creation of Venom was an evolutionary process that involved effects and character animation. All images © 2007 Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. All rights reserved.

In depicting Venom, one of the most popular super villains in the Spider-Man comic canon, Sam Raimi was insistent that the basic symbiotic goo creature from outer space be totally alien. It couldn't resemble a spider or an octopus, but rather a black creepy crawler in the best Ray Harryhausen tradition. According to animation supervisor Spencer Cook, the creation of this character was an evolutionary process to figure out how to piece together this bizarre collection of wind tubes, tendrils and other appendages that pulls it along. "This was a tricky balance to keep this thing looking alien," Cook insists.

And at Sony Pictures Imageworks they creatively blurred the lines between character and effects animation. "Dave Seager was the CG supervisor who developed the goo, so that was a thing that was a little painful because in the beginning nobody knew what goo was or what it looked like or how it moved," adds digital effects supervisor Peter Nofz.

Spencer Cook concentrated on hiring people with strong human animation skills, which is very labor intensive and painstaking. He also looked at people who could work with Maya in a very technical way. 

"In the beginning we got great conceptual art," Nofz continues. "Nevertheless, it took us some time to figure out how to animate and how to make it move. In the beginning, we tried a lot of procedural approaches and came to the conclusion that it wasn't going to cut it. It wasn't really what Sam wanted. He wanted intelligence, and he wanted something that was menacing and scary. So early on we realized that this was more of a character animation job. So Spencer Cook concentrated on hiring people with strong human animation skills, which is very labor intensive and painstaking: more than other animation because everybody knows when it doesn't look right and what needs to get fixed.

"We also looked at people that could work with Maya in a very technical way, and we came up with a subset of people. We told them that they would have to work with the effects animators and would also have to build rigs on a shot-by-shot basis because that's what this became. Rather than having a goo rig, it became a toolset where every animator put together his own goo rig quickly and then started animating it. And other animators would normally come up with main kinds of strands or pods, as we called them, and their motion and overall feeling and try to get an approval from Sam.

"And then a second group of effects animators would come in and would normally add more pods: connect different kinds of pods with spans or little membranes that either had dynamics or not depending on the needs of the shots. After they were done, we would leave the Maya pipeline and pipe it in finally to the Houdini pipeline, which has the advantage of the meta-balls, which is the kind of quality that the goo needed to have."