...itself.
Ready, and hold down, and green flash, and action.
The Sci-Fi Channel and Uline Cinema present an inside look at an exciting new film starring John Leguizamo, Michael Jai White, Martin Sheen, Teresa Randall, and D.B. Sweeney.
In the next half hour, witness a comic book character brought to life on the big screen.
Get behind the camera for some amazing stunts.
At Sea Visual Effects Pioneer, director Mark DePay teamed with Industrial Light and Magic's digital artists to merge computer animation and live action.
Raising movie visual effects to the next level and beyond.
If you've never heard of Spawn before, there are a lot of people who think you just spent the last five years trapped in a place like this.
Hi, I'm Michael Jai White, and welcome to the making of Spawn.
Spawn began as a comic book and has since sold over 80 million copies around the world.
In the film, I play military man on a mission, Al Simmons.
And I also play his ultimate destiny, that dark and mysterious superhero, Spawn.
Join me now as we go behind the scenes as we set out to bring Spawn from the comic book pages to the big screen.
Don't go away.
Jack in to the dominion in the home of science fiction on the web.
Welcome to the edge.
It feels strong and dependable, yet refreshing.
Fix it and fresh, a stronger, longer hold, combined with a cool, crisp sensation.
Fix it and fresh and forget it.
Honey, this is just a career opportunity.
I'm afraid they may not want me there.
May not?
We're trying to make it as painless as possible.
Just treat me the same, no better, no worse.
Ready for round two?
Oh, yeah, Master Chief.
I can't remember
G.I.J., rated R, starts August 22nd.
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I was sitting in the backyard one day last summer, and my oldest grandchild said,
so, you know, what are you doing?
And I said, well, I'm going to do this film. Spawn, I start real soon.
He nearly fainted, and he said, spawn, spawn, spawn, de-spawn.
I said, what's the big deal?
He said, well, it's only the most important comic book in the world.
I just finished a pretty lengthy run on Spider-Man.
Then a bunch of us had quit and started our own company, Image Comics.
And so, at that point, we all had to create a book that was going to hopefully sell for us.
Someone has something that's just really cool, and it's dark, and it's mysterious, it's funny at times.
It has a more intelligent, sophisticated sense about it.
Given that it's still a guy in a costume with super power, it's really more sci-fi-ish instead of comic book-ish.
My character, Al Simmons, government's most decorated assassin.
He's dealing in death for the sake of the country.
The airport kill zone was supposed to be clear of civilians.
You will follow orders and do your job. Got a problem with that, soldier?
Yes, I do, sir. And I won out.
You don't quit us, son.
Jason Nguyen, he's the head of the CIA, and he's in league with the devil, man. You know, he's a pretty evil character.
I'll arrange for your transfer right after we've run this last operation.
North Korean refinery secretly producing biological weapons. It's up to us to take out the plant.
Come on, son, this is top priority.
He is being kind of led by a clown who is the devil's man on Earth.
There's one more item on our to-do list. We need you to help me cook your all-time favorite killer, Al Simmons.
Why do you want him?
Why, ask why, when how is so much more fun?
And he's then betrayed by his superiors and is burned to a crisp and sent to hell.
And upon going to hell, in his angst, Al Simmons decides to do anything to be reunited with his woman, including selling his soul.
So that was the beauty of it for me to know this man just loved his woman so much that he sacrificed his life and entered the battle of Armageddon, stuck in purgatory, until God knows when.
Wanda!
What's going on?
I came out here and this man was lying next to Diane.
He happens to wind up a hideously deformed hell spawn.
Hey, mister, you don't look so good.
And he's been horribly disfigured because of the way he died.
And so the clown, who is able to go back and forth, goes there to train him to lead the armies of hell in the battle of Armageddon against the gates of heaven.
I don't mind being short, fat, and ugly, but the pay sucks.
Clown, to me, is this two-faced kind of character. He is a perverse, malicious, evil, malignant, horrible thing.
Just think of me as your guardian angel, the clown from hell.
But at the same time, he's got sort of a strange sense of humor.
Funny, funny, he's our man if he can't kill a nori cat. Yeah, he's funny.
Clown is this disgusting little man, but he happens to know the answers to a lot of questions that Spawn has to answer.
Just get me to a hospital.
A hospital? Have you looked in a mirror lately, burnt man walking?
Given the entire cast of ER, we put you back together again.
How do I put this to you? You're pushing up daisies, you're in permanent nap time, you're a fertilizer.
Hey, is any of this sinking in? You're dead.
D, D, D, dead, D.
So we trick him and trick him and trick him, hopefully he'll leave the armies, make him mad, make him commit one more vile crime so his soul will be ours, and that's my mission.
Of the people and things of hell I dubbed thee!
Spawn, general of hell's army!
He directs his hatred toward Jason Nguyen.
Time to get reacquainted, Jason.
Whom he believes is the reason for his situation.
You.
Who are you?
You don't recognize your own handiwork.
You left me to die in that biochem plant.
Remember?
I can't.
You sent me to hell, Jason.
I'm here to return the favor.
Making stunts like that one look realistic took a lot of hard work and planning.
And when we come back, you'll see a challenge John Liguizamo and I have to face every day.
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The production team on Spawn went to a lot of effort to make sure the movie was true to the comic book.
For example, when they lit me on fire, they used real fire.
And then there were the costumes.
Man, they're going to be amazed by me.
That's hard.
Because, I mean, I'm amazed by the prosthetic work that the makeup artist did.
And it was just amazing, man.
It's exactly what I pictured the comic book on page.
And here I am, pow.
It just transformed.
I'm as short as that.
The blue face, the fatness, the evil, the little sinister, the humor that the character has.
It's a Spawn workout video.
On the clown program, I lost 20 pounds.
It's the closest I've ever seen of that transition from page to visual.
So I was really thrilled to see what could I do with this.
Become this whole new creature.
And it was amazing.
I was in my trailer just staring at myself going, who am I?
A clown with an attitude.
What am I?
I am short, fat, and ugly, and that's how I feel.
I had a great time, but those prosthetics hurt, man.
That hurt for real.
I mean, it was always a challenge.
You're in there going, it's so hot.
It's so tight.
And everyone walks up to you and goes, I bet you it's hot in there, huh?
Come on, get out of the way, you annoying freak.
I'll slap you silly.
With the prosthetic, there are times you itch, that you want to scratch.
The little devil is telling you, take it off, take the thing off, just rip it off.
And once the suit goes on, you are sweating constantly.
I just have to kind of psych myself up because it's really uncomfortable.
It almost makes you go crazy.
Give me that tape brush, I want to stab your eyeball, too.
I had blisters on the back.
I got more blisters on the back of my neck.
I just felt them.
I'm like a Picasso face.
You know, half a dozen people every day saying, aren't you hot?
And I'm like, I want to kill you.
Get away from me.
Piss it up, guys.
Safety meeting.
This is the moment at which our hero is murdered.
My character basically gets burned beyond recognition.
My hands and my back will be on fire, and you'll see me in frame.
Enjoy your retirement, old friend.
This is our hero.
We want it to look like it's going to hurt like hell, but it can't really.
I wasn't afraid of fire, but I did want to be safeguarded against anything happening.
They soaked me down in this ice gel, this gel that sits in ice for four days prior to being applied.
I don't think I've ever been as cold in my life.
I was cold before he put this on me.
We're going to go ahead and light Michael up on fire.
Here we go.
Let's roll sound, please.
Ready and fire.
See you in hell, Al.
Lines up, lines up.
Wonder!
When they lit the fire, I actually felt good for a second.
And I really didn't mind doing other takes of it.
Because I'm like, man, I am so cold.
Please, light me on fire once again.
So it looks a lot more dangerous than it really is.
That's essentially the key to what we're doing.
But it must appear to be amazingly, demonically frightening.
See you later, Al.
He was betrayed by people and was killed and resurrected and made a deal with the devil.
And that's basically how he became Spawn.
Now he's got the power that he made in exchange for his soul.
I met Todd McFarlane, maybe three and a half years ago, back when Spawn was first being introduced.
And he was very interested in making a film based on his character.
As soon as I read the first few books, I saw the potential of the character.
The impetus I wanted to put into the character of Spawn was two things.
I wanted to have a character that had a wide breadth of what he could accomplish on a power scale.
And then on top of that, I wanted to bring in some of my own personal ideas in terms of what a hero would be like if theoretically he was walking the planet right now.
Your anger is your weakness, and they'll use it to rob you of any humanity you have left.
Who are you?
Cogliostro is the fatherly guy trying to push Al to say, if you do things right, you might be able to break this thing.
Just say goodbye, clown.
This is just what they want. You're playing their game.
Then I'll play dirty.
Gums are useless.
You've got a better idea.
That first is a rocky relationship. He doesn't know where the guy's coming from.
He becomes somewhat of a mentor when he is exposed as a former Hellspawn himself.
You see, you've been using your armor only by reflex. You must learn to control it.
It has trillions of neural connections that are a living extension of your own instincts, instantly translating your thought into physical reality.
So long as you stay clear and focused.
You must visualize your objective. The armor does the rest.
All right, Yoda, just wait a second.
The costume's actually like an outer flesh, and it's symbiotic with means it's alive on him.
It'll kind of fade in and fade out.
Spikes will grow and shrink.
Capes will appear and contract.
He can will weapons in his hands.
He heals. You know, if he gets shot, he's able to heal it.
He has all of these things.
Not bad.
Don't get cocky. You have a lot more to learn.
Still to come, see how computers blur the line between reality and fantasy in the making of Spawn.
What is this thing inside me?
A bomb.
Bombshell, a Sci-Fi Channel original movie, Saturday, August 9th at 9 p.m.
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Is there more to entertainment than 500 channel TV and zillion dollar movies?
Turning the sound up and your mind off?
Is there still a place where fun involves thinking, imagining, doing?
Some of us think so, and we find it in a game.
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Here's Cloudy.
I want to know why you picked me to lead to a war.
Well, well, if it isn't curious crispy.
Cloud is a conduit to understanding.
All those assassin missions we're just training for what's coming.
He deals with the clown until he can take him no more.
Uh-oh, you got that, I want to beat the fat little man look in your eye.
Then he finds out Cloud has a surprise of his own.
I'm gonna cut you into 50 pieces and mail you to every state.
Oh, there's a lot of things.
Cloud is a man of a million disguises.
No more clowning around.
When I get my rage up.
I'm not the vindicator or the victimizer.
I get my hell up.
Or the vaporizer or the vibrator.
I turn into a violator.
Violator!
Here's where digital magic makes fantasy and reality come together.
Using three-dimensional computer animation, the filmmakers,
along with the effects wizards at Industrial Light and Magic,
gave Spawn a look all its own.
In the case of going from clown to violator,
we go through these massive contortions
into characters in pain the whole time.
We go from this fat little round character
into somebody that had totally a different design to them
and changing the textures as well.
These are things that we've never really approached before.
This is the violator digital model.
The clown does an interpolation.
He actually makes a three-dimensional morph
from the clown, his human form,
to his demonic form, which is the violator.
We've sort of become pretty good
with having actors act at points of view.
I mean, it's very difficult after the 28th shot,
you know, the 10th take, when you say,
okay, see that piece of tape up there in the ceiling?
That's a huge, gaping, growling creature,
you know, believe it or not.
We tried to show people as much as we could
what they were dealing with.
Fortunately, having a big rubber model down there
gave them an impression of what was going to happen.
You could say, okay, take a look at this creature, right?
He's made of rubber.
Now, remember the way the T-Rex looked in Jurassic?
Remember how mean and how fast he moved?
That's what's going to happen here.
Cut.
The thing that Mark the Paid brings,
given his knowledge of what he's done at ILM
and knowing that there's going to be
a lot of special effects in this movie,
that there are times when you have to know
what you're directing and how it's going to meld
with your special effects, you know?
You're rushing through here to talk Spawn in you.
He's actually just behind running after you.
And since I'm working with him,
I've discovered that he invented the animals
for Jurassic Park, you know,
so we're in very capable hands.
I couldn't think of a better grip to be in
if you're going to do Spawn, you know?
This guy's got all the moves, you know?
Then you have all these weapons that are kind of hanging out.
You peel them off and throw them in the car
and say, no guts, no groin.
Spawn has these powers
that are very hard to create in reality.
They just, you know, don't exist.
So we're going to be using computer animation
to bring them to life.
As he comes down through this dome,
the classic coming through the glass cave scene
in a superhero movie.
But with the difference that
we were able to make it much more majestic,
inspired by the cave in the comic book,
it's alive and it's part of him
and it comes out of him and it behaves,
it's like another character almost.
We have that ability and that flexibility
in digital to actually do that,
which would be very, very difficult
in a practical situation in live action.
That is one of the biggest reasons
to do Spawn with computer graphics
as opposed to using the other means of effects.
The story, of course, is about the Spawn
based on the comic book,
but a lot of the stylized look,
we tried to incorporate a lot of that.
But a lot of it doesn't work if it's moving.
So we had to invent our own dialogue
of motion to do with Spawn.
That new technique bridged the gap
between human movement
and computer animated characters.
In order to capture the way that
Michael Jai White has moved,
we're capturing his motion
from motion capture data
and inserting it into the Spawn costume.
Electronic sensors are attached
to Michael's body suit
and a 3D camera system records his movements.
The computer then translates
those movements to a digital model.
The majority of the big action sequence fights
that we'll see in the movie
will be computer generated.
Violator, which is data
that we just invented in terms of the motion,
then we have Michael Jai White's motion
added to Spawn computer generated data
over top of that. So those are essentially
sort of three different fundamental things
coming out of it together to make the shot work.
Besides all the amazing
visual elements they're going to be,
we're going to have amazing creatures,
amazing fights and chases.
Surreal, unbelievably strange
and interesting characters.
It's been pretty intense.
It's an experience I've never had before.
Spawn goes for the juggler.
It goes for the aggressive thing
the kids want.
It still has humor.
It still has character.
It still has story.
Are there any normal people left on Earth?
Nothing subtle about this piece, you know.
When they're done watching this,
I want them to go Batman just to see.
Spawn's got quite a battle in store for him.
It's one thing to have to fight the forces of evil,
like Wind and the Violator.
It's even tougher when the future of all mankind
depends on the outcome.
So, will Spawn be able to stop them
from carrying out global annihilation?
Well, I guess you'll just have to
check out the film and see for yourself.
I hope you've enjoyed this visit
behind the scenes of Spawn.
I'm Michael Jai White.
Thanks for watching.
Discretion advised.
Copyright © 2019, New Thinking Allowed Foundation
In the third millennium,
the world changed.
Climate, nations,
all were in upheaval.
The Earth transformed
into a poisonous, scorched desert
known as the Cursed Earth.
Millions of people
crowded into a few megacities
where roaming bands of street savages
created violence
the justice system could not control.
Law as we know it
collapsed.
From the decay
rose a new order.
A society ruled by a new elite force.
A force with the power
to dispense both justice
and punishment.
They were the police, jury
and executioner all in one.
They were the judges.
Aspen Prison Shuttle docked.
Paroles prepared to disembark.
Ferguson, Herman.
Six-month sentence.
Aspen prison served.
Welcome back, citizen.
Your living assignment is...
White Block, Heavenly Haven, Red Quad.
Thanks for watching.