Bellow are some exemples of an important part of my job for Amazing Spiderman (Note that I used final stills for the demonstration):
In a sequence, the wicked guy produces a power outage in the whole New York City. A thing like this can not be done for real while shooting .
It means that all the lights in the plates had to be painted out and provided on separate layers. It can be quite simple, like in example A (pic below left) that represents a vertical pan, or in pics D and E where we can see the two main states, from light «on» to «off». But it can also be much more complex depending on the camera movement: In the B an C pics, the plate is a flying camera over Time Square. Starting on some key frames of the source footage, I provided numerous layers of buildings with lights painted off, from background to foreground. Relying on the matchmove datas, MPC lead environment Alex Clarke then reprojected all these layers on each corresponding building of a 3D database. It allowed for the creation of «turned off» buildings matching the real camera movement. At this moment of the story, the power outage is coming to its end so lights could be brought back by unmasking the source plate progressively.