The Birth of Sandman

The Birth of Sandman sequence in Spider-Man 3 involved creating a human-sized character who emerges from a pile of sand in full view under a well-lit environment. The scale of the shot ranges from macro close up views of single sand grains to distant views of the entire sand pile as Sandman emerges. The sequence begins with a fully CG 2,672-frame shot that slowly revolves around sandman as he forms. The Imageworks Sand FX team had an enormous challenge of transferring character animation into a physically plausible animation of hundreds of millions of sand grains forming into a human form.