Web Swinger

GHOST IN THE MACHINE From the plastic model stage, Shelob had to make its biggest leap: into the computer. ''It's quite a process to get it in there, because it isn't as straightforward as it seems,'' says Rygiel. Although it was relatively easy to laser-scan the model into the computer to create a 3-D image, the process of giving Shelob a skeleton was painstaking work. ''You have to rig the muscles to move correctly. The work is in making it animatable,'' says Rygiel.

Other tedious steps included adding color, hair, and matching the spider's lighting to that of the real film footage he was ultimately inserted into. ''Computer programs are just not as sophisticated as the real world when it comes to lighting,'' says Rygiel. ''You may have technically perfect versions of what the spider should be, but then you'd stick him in a cave and he didn't look right.'' Animators had to painstakingly hand-tweak shades and color from frame to frame to make Shelob blend into his surroundings.

BIG HAIRY DEAL Shelob may have been based on a tunnelweb spider, but making him look like a bad guy who could throw his weight around took some creativity. ''You have to break the phenomenon of 'Well, here's a really small spider we just blew up,''' says Rygiel. For the Weta team, it took guts. ''We wanted [the abdomen] to be this gelatinous sac that squished around as he moved and compressed correctly when he shoved himself into the tunnel.'' According to Rygiel, without taking weight into consideration Shelob's tight squeeze would have looked like ''a big cork going in.'' Or kind of like Jack Nicholson putting on a Speedo.

DETAILS, DETAILS Though some fans will be too busy covering their eyes to even see it, the massive arachnid's slow-then-fast gait was an unexpected development. ''I always thought of Shelob as this slow, creeping thing,'' Rygiel says. ''But one of our animators came up with this quick, skittering approach. The minute we saw it, we thought, 'Oh, that's interesting!' So we have a combination of skittering and crawling.''

Another last-minute tweak had to do with Shelob's once-immaculate grooming. ''I remember at one point we had a big argument,'' says Rygiel. ''Shelob was beautifully rendered, but he looked too clean.'' Rygiel argued that a cave-dwelling arachnid would be covered in spider webs and dirt. ''So the whole crew got sort of p---ed off, and we had to go back and add spider webs.'' It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.