How 'No Way Home' pulled off Spider-Man's bridge fight against Doctor Octopus

• The epic bridge fight in "Spider-Man: No Way Home" employed CGI and old-school practical effects.
• Air-pressure-powered special effects allowed the crew to drop cement pipes and launch cars for real.
• The toughest stunts required digital doubles, but Tom Holland did many of his own moves on set.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Following is a transcript of the video:

Narrator: In the iconic bridge fight from "Spider-Man: No Way Home," Doctor Octopus' tentacles were the work of the visual effects team, but on set, the car and these exploding water barrels were very real.

Scott Edelstein: Even if we're going to replace all that and have digital versions of things, if you can shoot something, it's always better.

Narrator: That's visual effects supervisor Scott Edelstein. His team collaborated with special effects supervisor Dan Sudick to find the right mix of practical and digital to create "No Way Home"'s action-packed bridge fight, like when Doc Octopus first emerges with his mechanical arms.

To really sell the strength of these CGI arms, Dan devised way to crush the cars practically into what the crew called "taco cars."

Dan Sudick: When I saw the previs, I thought, "Wow, wouldn't it be great if we could just pull down the center of the car very hard and just let the car fold up by itself?"

Narrator: First, Dan built a steel platform with a hole in the middle. Then he placed the car on top of it and attached two cables to the bottom center of the car, pulling it through while it split in half. Shots like this one --

Doc Ock: Hello, Peter.

Narrator: Where Doc Ock was simply suspended in the air, were equally challenging.

Unlike in 2004's "Spider-Man 2," Alfred Molina did not wear a pair of puppeteered claws on set. While the actor now had more flexibility to move around, Digital Domain would have to know how to place his arms in the shot, especially when they held him up like this.

The best visual effects references depended on how high his body was above the ground, which varied throughout.

Sometimes the crew could use cables to lift him up, letting him move his real legs around more freely, but it wasn't very comfortable. Other times he was strapped to a tuning fork, where crew members could steer and turn him from behind, as seen here, when he pulled himself up from under the bridge.

When the arms brought him down to the ground, they used a moving platform that could be lowered and operated like a Technocrane. This got even trickier for the VFX team as the sequence progressed and the character interacted more and more with his surroundings.

Scott: Jon Watts, the director, really wants to have his movements make sense and to have weight, so you don't want him to feel light or any of the things that he's interacting with to feel light.

Narrator: This meant establishing clear physics about what he could and couldn't do.

For example, he always had at least two hands on the ground supporting him for balance, even as he lifted two cars at once. The way he handled objects also needed careful consideration.

Scott: He steps forward and throws a car, he has to transfer that weight, and another arm has to go land on the ground to hold him up as he's throwing the car forward.

Narrator: The practical team also applied these rules to props used in the fight, like here, when Doc Ock throws a gigantic pipe at Spider-Man and instead crushes a car. Dan and lead visual effects supervisor Kelly Port wanted the pipe to fall like a baseball bat, so it had to practically collapse at an angle rather than flat.

Dan: It basically is faster at the tip and slower at the handle.

Narrator: To achieve this unique effect, Dan used two cables to hold the concrete and steel pipe straight. Each cable was attached to a pneumatic cylinder, which released air pressure at different speeds.

Dan: We could force the tip of the pipe down into the car faster than the front of the pipe would fall, and then we'd pull the front of the pipe at a certain speed.

Narrator: But that only took them so far.

During an initial test, the pipe crushed the top of the car, but not its sides, so the sides were actually weakened beforehand by cutting out the doorframes. Then the crew hid cables inside the car, so when the pipe collapsed, the cables brought the sides of the car down with it.

Now, it would've been too dangerous for Tom Holland and his doubles to actually dodge that pipe, so for this shot, the action elements in the frame were shot separately and combined in postproduction.

In one take, Tom rolled over the hood of a car to make it look like he was dodging the pipe. Then the crew shot the pipe rig on its own while replicating the speed and positioning of the camera as closely as possible.

Scott: We track the camera within all those environments, and we do a lot of reprojecting so that we can bring it all into one camera, basically.

Narrator: In the end, changes in the edit meant Digital Domain had to make this a fully CG shot, but many of the original movements from the camera and the actor are still there.

Scott: We do try, even if we're going to exaggerate it, to use the base of what he's done and then embellish it.

Narrator: Spider-Man also has to rescue the assistant vice chancellor from her car as it teeters over the edge of the bridge.

The entire stunt was broken up into three parts: the car going over the bridge, the car crashing through the guardrail, and the car dangling in the air.

This required building a whole new set.

While the main stretch of highway was on the ground, this one was elevated 20 feet, so the car could hang without hitting anything. First, the car was placed on a small track to move it forward. Then it was guided by cables for the moment it sputters out of control.

Dan: We wanted it to look a little more natural when it got hit and let it kind of just swing into the railing as opposed to just follow this exact arc.

Narrator: To make the car crash through the guardrail, Dan built a piece of the rail out of beaded foam. He then painted it and plastered the edges before pre-breaking it into smaller pieces.

Finally, he put it back together so the car could smash through it.

Dan: We built 20 or 25 feet of breakaway because we figured the length of the car was 16, 17 feet long.

Narrator: The car was later placed on a gimbal in front of a blue screen, so it would look like it was really teetering at a 90-degree angle over the edge. The gimbal was safe enough for actress Paula Newsome to be inside the car, so cameras could capture her terrified facial expressions.

Filming her upside down was particularly helpful for the VFX artists.

Scott: You really get the dynamics with her hair and the movement of her clothes and all that.

Narrator: And instead of looking out at Spider-Man, she's actually looking at a tennis ball, which was then easily erased in postproduction.

As Spider-Man tries to pull her car to safety, Doc Ock throws another car at him, which hits some barrels instead. According to Dan, the director wanted it to be raining water, so Dan had to manipulate both the car and the barrels.

This required putting a 20-foot nitrogen cannon diagonally through the car. That cannon was attached to a high-pressure accumulator to launch it forward. Dan also filled the water barrels with pyrotechnics linked to a timer.

Dan: We knew the speed of the car going into the barrels, so we knew how many tenths of a second it would take for the car to hit all the barrels.

Narrator: Once the car hit the first barrel, each one blew up in order at the speed the car was coming at them.

The practical stunt looked great, but the trajectory was slightly off. So using the original shot as reference, Scott actually replaced the car with a completely CG model.

Scott: We needed the car to start higher, because Doc was further down the road and he was up on his arms. The car needed to kind of roll as it was going towards Spider-Man.

Narrator: Many of these fighting shots actually used digital doubles, which worked out, since the nanotech-powered Iron Spider Suit was created with CG.

Doc Ock: You've outdone yourself, Peter.

Narrator: But because Spider-Man removes his mask, they couldn't just do a full body swap. Like the assistant vice chancellor on the gimbal, they also needed to film Tom hanging in the air.

Scott: The way he moves his body, tilts his neck, holds himself, is all reminiscent of somebody actually hanging upside down.

Narrator: But the constant movement of the action made it hard to accurately place the iconic costume. So Tom wore what's known as a fractal suit. The patterns on the suit gave animators the easiest way to map the digital body onto the actor's body.

Scott: If his chest turns or moves or his arms are moving, you can see those patterns moving easier than if he was just in a plain suit.

Narrator: For the tentacles, Doc Ock's jacket had holes in the back of it. These red tracking marks allowed VFX to accurately place the arms, despite the constant moving camera and action.

Scott: You can locate where the arm is and really stick it to that little dot, because if it's swimming around, then it looks like it's swimming around on his back.

Narrator: After pulling the assistant vice chancellor's car up, Spidey uses his web blasters to pull the car door off.

The web was a fully CG creation, but on set, the special effects team needed to create enough force to take the door off by itself. That first meant replacing its hinge pins with ones made out of balsa wood. The door was then attached to a cable from the outside that was powered by a pneumatic piston.

Dan: The accumulator lets the air rush into the piston, piston closes, pulls a cable, the door comes off.

Narrator: Pre-destroying cars off-set was also useful for the moment when the Green Goblin's pumpkin bomb explodes.

The cars were actually taken apart and then put back together before being brought to set, allowing for these dramatic results. And it was up to Scott and his team to enhance all these crashes and explosions while populating the shot and digitally extending the bridge.

According to Scott, Digital Domain created 250 static cars parked on the bridge, plus 1,100 digital cars driving around the city in the distance.

Those cars are all variations of just a handful of digital car models. Meanwhile, the cars that were closest to the camera needed to be digitally scanned.

Scott: They do a basic texture shoot of photography for what the car looks like, what the texture is.

Narrator: When adding these digital cars in, each car is then customized based on the action on-screen to ensure continuity, so the team had to keep track of everything from dirt stains to the exact position where a car was originally placed.

Scott: Well, there's a whole lot that goes into just tracking where everything lives.

Narrator: So, why even bother shooting time-consuming and complicated effects for real if so many of them are replaced digitally? It's all invaluable reference for some very unique ideas, like how glass looks after a car gets crushed.

Scott: The way that the metal bends, it's not always super sharp. A lot of times it's kind of softer curves. The side windows sometimes when it's getting crushed like that literally explode into a bajillion little tiny safety pieces.

Narrator: And you never know what real elements can make their way into the final shot.

Scott: We kept the water barrels exploding, so in that particular shot, all that water is real. And we had to remove the practical car from inside of all that water and add our CG car.

Tom Holland is extraordinarily athletic and did a lot of his own stunts. Whether we up using the entire performance or not, it's really good reference for us. Or we do use it, and it's great to see his physicality and how his body moves and what he's doing, because a lot of his performance is coming from that.

Doc Ock: Now you die.

[Peter groaning]