Observations: Why Spider-Man's latest enemy is off the CGI scale

It may come as a shock, but giant, mutated man-lizards don't happen to be real. So, in order to make Spider-Man's nemesis The Lizard believable, the effects team had to hit the books – and the pet shop.

“It was a tremendous amount of work,” explains Jerome Chen, senior special effects supervisor, who had to research everything. “There's no computer programme that, for instance, allows you to just create a layout of scales... so we spent hundreds of hours researching lizards to hand-craft the scales.”

The biggest issue was the mash-up of reptilian and humanoid anatomy, the latter coming from actor, Rhys Ifans. “We were using scientific guidelines to help define where his muscles were, how big they'd be and how they would move. The Lizard, in his full mutated form, is 9ft tall and 650 lbs, so we took video references of athletes running and rhinos charging so you could feel that mass of muscle moving around.”

'The Amazing Spider-Man' is out now