MARZETTE BONAR

It was such a blast being part of a team, that set a new standard for hero costumes. In past hero films, only solid colors were used, but with Spider-man, depth was added by printing an intricate pattern on the fabric. We designed it to create an optical illusion of defined muscles!

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Having been trained in Costume Construction, I had to break away from traditional sewing by hand and learn how to sew digitally.

 

I was asked to design the different patterns to be printed on the fabric, but with one caveat... the costume had to cover the actor's entire body without any sewing seams showing, (except for his quads).

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Since there wasn't a program that could shape the tiny rectangles in this unique way, I took on the challenge of designing one rectangle at a time; stretching and constricting them to create the illusion.

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On separate files, I painted the muscles' shadows and highlights, then on another file, the colors and finally another for the webbing. All those files had to align perfectly to the hard-copy sewing patterns. Yes, this was a huge life-sized file, covering the entire surface of a man's body.

 

Then my hero, Yakov Baytler, finally figured out how to build the pattern in a 3D program. And because the file was so huge, it took all weekend to render!

 

The colorized suit was then silk screened onto spandex and sewn. Unfortunately, the tiny repetitive lines strobed on film, so I had to fade the intricate pattern we had worked so carefully on.

 

Just in time, the 'Spidy' suit came out 'seamlessly' perfect.

For Spider-Man 2, I was able to make the same pattern more visible, because it was on a darker colored Spidy suit and didn't strobe on film.

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Many more hours of seamSTRESSing, printing and airbrushing by a meticulous crew, went into this masterpiece. What a privilege to work closely with Academy Award winner, Costume Designer, James Acheson. 

 

It truly was The Amazing Spider-Man costume!