:<Projects
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Company: Sony Torchlight
Role: Visualization Supervisor
Time on project: Sept 2025-May 2026
Torchlight Head of Visualization: Alex Cannon
Marvel VFX Supervisor: Jerome Chen
Taking Over Postvis Mid-Flight: Lessons from Spider-Man: Brand New Day
A case study in joining a company and leading their main visualization team through over 800 shots, over 30 sequences, and a steep learning curve on a tentpole motion picture.
The Setup
Seven and a half months. One team. Thirty-three sequences. Eight hundred and forty-three assigned shots on a film with roughly 1,600 VFX shots total. That was the scope waiting for me when I stepped in to help lead postvis on Marvel and Sony's Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, at a young visualization studio just two years into building itself into a serious player on tentpole features.
The brief was ambitious: stand up and scale a full postvis operation (with some previs carried early on by head of visualization Alex Cannon) for one of the biggest and beloved superhero franchises in the industry, at a studio that was still actively building out the pipeline to match the scale of work it had earned.
This is a look back at how that project actually ran — what worked, what broke, and what I'd do differently next time (NDA compliant).
The Scope
The sequences spanned nearly the entire film, covering a wide range of dramatic and action beats. The work touched full NYC and Queens environment builds, hero and supporting characters, props, and effects work — essentially every major asset category a modern tentpole requires.
By the time our engagement wrapped, over 100 of our shots had gone all the way to final. That's a meaningful number for a postvis team, and it points to a strategy that shaped the whole project.
We worked alongside a strong bench of final VFX vendors on the show, including Sony Pictures Imageworks, Framestore, ILM, SPI, and Cantina, with our studio pushing to be seen as a genuine finals-capable partner rather than a purely postvis vendor.
The Strategy
Rather than treating postvis as a disposable, editorial-only deliverable, we built the engagement around a few core bets:
That last point mattered most. Once the client — including VFX Supervisor Jerome Chen and VFX Producer David Bosco — saw our postvis shots could survive contact with final delivery, our team's scope grew organically over the course of the project.
What Actually Made This Hard
None of this happened smoothly, and that's what made it worth writing about. This was a studio moving fast to meet a moment, and the growing pains that come with that are familiar to anyone who's helped scale a young shop:
Underneath all of it: I was the new authority figure joining an existing team. This required showing respect, earning trust fast, making accurate and timely assessments of team strengths and skill gaps, and adding momentum without steamrolling anyone or triggering backlash. For every project I help manage, I make sure to read a new book to improve my competency, and I credit Michael Watkins' invaluable book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting up to Speed Faster and Smarter for having a solid plan in advance of joining and navigating a major corporation and team with very little onboarding time to spare.
How We Got Through It
A few practices, built together with the team, ended up doing most of the work:
The Result
Beyond the shot count, the client's scope of work expanded to cover most areas of the film, and the studio walked away positioned as a genuine finals-capable vendor rather than a pure visualization shop.
What I'd Do Differently
Looking back, two things stand out as gaps I'd close next time: pushing harder for face-to-face shot and note kickoffs so team members had more chances to catch every detail and had a full chance to ask questions, and upgrading certain assets when they became featured more up close or required more features. You can't overlook how important the human factor is, even on productions with the fastest pace and highest urgency.
What I Took Away
This project was as much a test of leadership, adaptability and resiliency as it was of technical execution. Entering a major studio and an established team as a new authority figure on a tight deadline — and doing it without rubbing anyone the wrong way — was its own skill to hone. So was learning how to properly close out a project like this: cementing the experience with the team while it was still fresh, with personal thank-yous and screening a breakdown reel of the team's work, rather than letting a hard-won win fade quietly into the next show.
On the technical side, this was also where I built out a repeatable approach to Unreal Engine visualization breakdowns, began my education with the Nuke compositing software, and got more hands-on with shot annotation and review workflows at the largest production scale — practices I've carried into every project since.
When factoring in a new company, team, boss, and client and facing the highest level of pressure, I knew going in to Sony and Brand New Day that if I ended the project having met or exceeded expectations, it would mean hitting a new bar in my abilities as a visualization supervisor. By the end, I felt more confident than ever that I could lead creative teams of all kinds and conditions in this part of the industry, and as always I look forward whatever the challenge is that lies ahead as an artist, team mate, and manager.
Upon release, the film broke major box office records:
Variety: Spider-Man: Brand New Day Sets Box Office Record With $72 Million in Previews, Beating ‘Avengers: Endgame’
Hollywood Reporter: ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Leaps to Record $168M First Day for Historic Opening Weekend
'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' crosses ₹100cr in India
‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Nearly Topples ‘Avengers: Endgame’ $357M All-Time U.S. Weekend Record – Sunday AM Box Office Update
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Company: Sony Torchlight
Role: Visualization Supervisor
Time on project: Sept 2025-May 2026
Torchlight Head of Visualization: Alex Cannon
Marvel VFX Supervisor: Jerome Chen
Taking Over Postvis Mid-Flight: Lessons from Spider-Man: Brand New Day
A case study in joining a company and leading their main visualization team through over 800 shots, over 30 sequences, and a steep learning curve on a tentpole motion picture.
The Setup
Seven and a half months. One team. Thirty-three sequences. Eight hundred and forty-three assigned shots on a film with roughly 1,600 VFX shots total. That was the scope waiting for me when I stepped in to help lead postvis on Marvel and Sony's Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, at a young visualization studio just two years into building itself into a serious player on tentpole features.
The brief was ambitious: stand up and scale a full postvis operation (with some previs carried early on by head of visualization Alex Cannon) for one of the biggest and beloved superhero franchises in the industry, at a studio that was still actively building out the pipeline to match the scale of work it had earned.
This is a look back at how that project actually ran — what worked, what broke, and what I'd do differently next time (NDA compliant).
The Scope
The sequences spanned nearly the entire film, covering a wide range of dramatic and action beats. The work touched full NYC and Queens environment builds, hero and supporting characters, props, and effects work — essentially every major asset category a modern tentpole requires.
By the time our engagement wrapped, over 100 of our shots had gone all the way to final. That's a meaningful number for a postvis team, and it points to a strategy that shaped the whole project.
We worked alongside a strong bench of final VFX vendors on the show, including Sony Pictures Imageworks, Framestore, ILM, SPI, and Cantina, with our studio pushing to be seen as a genuine finals-capable partner rather than a purely postvis vendor.
The Strategy
Rather than treating postvis as a disposable, editorial-only deliverable, we built the engagement around a few core bets:
- Realtime postvis as the default workflow — leaning on Unreal Engine rather than traditional offline Maya-based pipelines to move and iterate faster without sacrificing fidelity.
- Hiring senior, Unreal-fluent artists rather than generalists, and cross-training previs artists into postvis so the team could flex across both disciplines as the schedule demanded. We had over 17 visualization artists and compositors to oversee, and I coordinated with asset artists and production staff.
- Bringing Nuke compositors in-house to push shots closer to final quality, rather than stopping at a traditional postvis bar.
- Positioning the studio as a "one-stop shop" — turning over actual final shots where possible, which is what ultimately let us expand the scope of work to cover most of the film's editorial needs.
That last point mattered most. Once the client — including VFX Supervisor Jerome Chen and VFX Producer David Bosco — saw our postvis shots could survive contact with final delivery, our team's scope grew organically over the course of the project.
What Actually Made This Hard
None of this happened smoothly, and that's what made it worth writing about. This was a studio moving fast to meet a moment, and the growing pains that come with that are familiar to anyone who's helped scale a young shop:
- A pipeline still being built in real time, often from the ground up, alongside the show itself.
- A team finding its rhythm together, with plenty of people working together for the first time and being asked to hit tentpole speed early. Avoiding favoritism, spotting opportunities for artists to step into new responsibilities and testing their adaptability and versatilility.
- Remote production, which added friction to problems that might have been quick hallway conversations in person.
- Real technical growing pains — hardware, workstation performance, and a steady stream of Unreal Engine technical exceptions the team was solving as it went, without a complete playbook to lean on yet.
- A heavy meeting cadence and documentation practices that needed almost as much investment as the pipeline itself
Underneath all of it: I was the new authority figure joining an existing team. This required showing respect, earning trust fast, making accurate and timely assessments of team strengths and skill gaps, and adding momentum without steamrolling anyone or triggering backlash. For every project I help manage, I make sure to read a new book to improve my competency, and I credit Michael Watkins' invaluable book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting up to Speed Faster and Smarter for having a solid plan in advance of joining and navigating a major corporation and team with very little onboarding time to spare.
How We Got Through It
A few practices, built together with the team, ended up doing most of the work:
- A top-heavy team with talented newcomers. Alex's casting was spot-on. The people I worked with all showed a good blend of professionalism, skill, talent, and good attitudes. Jobs are scarcer in this industry now, so it's easier to have your choice of experienced people from a loose labor market, but this meant our team had decades of combined experience, and even the newcomers who I didn't know before consistently surprised me with their capabilities. Everyone truly brought their best to work each day, and a movie like this deserved nothing less.
- Surfacing problems early and publicly. Rather than quietly absorbing system issues, we made a habit of flagging hardware and pipeline problems to leadership as soon as they appeared, so the studio could get ahead of them instead of letting them compound. The artists were very experienced and knew how to volunteer concerns or hindrances on time before things came to a head.
- Tools were designed as-needed. We knew not every item on our wish-list would be addressed, but frequent check-ins kept the team vigilant about looking for ways to increase our efficiency.
- We documented as we went, not after. Every workflow issue and its resolution were acknowledged, which we then converted into living best-practice documentation — turning one-off fixes into institutional knowledge that made the whole team faster over time.
- A high quality bar from day one. Although this took time to reach with efficiency, the team knew what extra amount was needed to get shots approved. By the end we were our own toughest critics and this made it more likely for us to get shots approved on the first round.
- A culture of looking out for each other. This has always been a component of successful teams that I've witnessed, from support when a shot gets behind, to bridging information gaps when questions and needs arise in chatrooms.
The Result
Beyond the shot count, the client's scope of work expanded to cover most areas of the film, and the studio walked away positioned as a genuine finals-capable vendor rather than a pure visualization shop.
What I'd Do Differently
Looking back, two things stand out as gaps I'd close next time: pushing harder for face-to-face shot and note kickoffs so team members had more chances to catch every detail and had a full chance to ask questions, and upgrading certain assets when they became featured more up close or required more features. You can't overlook how important the human factor is, even on productions with the fastest pace and highest urgency.
What I Took Away
This project was as much a test of leadership, adaptability and resiliency as it was of technical execution. Entering a major studio and an established team as a new authority figure on a tight deadline — and doing it without rubbing anyone the wrong way — was its own skill to hone. So was learning how to properly close out a project like this: cementing the experience with the team while it was still fresh, with personal thank-yous and screening a breakdown reel of the team's work, rather than letting a hard-won win fade quietly into the next show.
On the technical side, this was also where I built out a repeatable approach to Unreal Engine visualization breakdowns, began my education with the Nuke compositing software, and got more hands-on with shot annotation and review workflows at the largest production scale — practices I've carried into every project since.
When factoring in a new company, team, boss, and client and facing the highest level of pressure, I knew going in to Sony and Brand New Day that if I ended the project having met or exceeded expectations, it would mean hitting a new bar in my abilities as a visualization supervisor. By the end, I felt more confident than ever that I could lead creative teams of all kinds and conditions in this part of the industry, and as always I look forward whatever the challenge is that lies ahead as an artist, team mate, and manager.
Upon release, the film broke major box office records:
Variety: Spider-Man: Brand New Day Sets Box Office Record With $72 Million in Previews, Beating ‘Avengers: Endgame’
Hollywood Reporter: ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Leaps to Record $168M First Day for Historic Opening Weekend
'Spider-Man: Brand New Day' crosses ₹100cr in India
‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Nearly Topples ‘Avengers: Endgame’ $357M All-Time U.S. Weekend Record – Sunday AM Box Office Update
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