Doc Ock bemoans his fate as his lab implodes. All images ™ & © 2004 Marvel Characters Inc. © 2004 Sony Pictures Digital. All rights reserved.

Sony's hugely successful Spider-Man franchise is the latest hit on the résumé of John Dykstra, but it isn't the first time this visual effects supervisor has been in a position to push filmmaking technology into new terrain. Dykstra's career was launched back in 1977 with Star Wars, which won him an Oscar and arguably marked the start of the modern era of visual effects.

The motion control photography technology he co-developed for Star Wars also earned Dykstra a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and his photographic ingenuity became a key characteristic of the company he subsequently founded, Apogee Film Effects. Among his achievements during that period was an Emmy Award for the visual effects in Battlestar Galactica.

Dykstra focused on commercial work from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, and then joined Sony Pictures Imageworks to create visual effects for 1999's Stuart Little. That work earned Dykstra an Oscar nomination, as did the first Spider-Man in 2002.

Spider-Man 2 presented several new effects challenges, and Dykstra discusses his approach and the strides made since the original film. He also reflects on how advances in digital technology have changed the role of the visual effects supervisor itself.

John Dykstra believes that applying electronic technology to films is a watershed moment for vfx.

Ellen Wolff: Given the success of the first Spider-Man, what did you want to expand upon in the sequel?

John Dykstra: What Sam [Raimi, the film's director] wanted was to give people watching the movie a sense of the reality of the situation. That's tied to our empathy with the character of Spider-Man, a guy who's representative of our better selves.

The trick that the visual effects had to do was to take you from the guy-next-door world into his superhero world. Because in order for you to understand the conflict for the character, you have to be able to partake of what it's like to be a superhero. You may not have a punch that could knock out a gorilla, and you may not be able to hold a bus over your head, but certainly one of the things that you can participate in is flying through the city. So one thing that was critical was to create a realistic sense of flying with our hero, to give you a sense of the joy of being this character.

The experience of flight was fairly evocative in the first movie, but in this film the character spends more time in the upper climes of the city. Sam wanted a more vertiginous experience for the audience. I think that the more sophisticated version of the flight through the city that we did for this movie is part of what makes you realize that's there's something beyond the responsibility of being a superhero — it's the experience of being able to fly through the city with ease.