[Peter Parker] Remember, what makes your different,

Let's go!

[Peter] Is what makes you Spider-Man.

My name is Danny Dimian,

I'm the visual effects supervisor.

And I'm Joshua Beveridge.

I was head of character animation on Spider-Man:

Into the Spider-Verse.

[Spider-Man] My name is Peter Parker,

I'm pretty sure you know the rest.

[Danny] When we started the film, we really didn't know

what we wanted the film to look like.

We did know what our inspiration was.

We all loved comic books.

And we went back and we looked at comic books

to see what was special about them.

We fell in love with the half-toning, the hatching,

and the line work.

We were really inspired by Jack Kirby's illustrations.

He has the Kirby Krackle, or Kirby Dots that he uses a lot.

[Joshua] You'll see these dots as a motif

through the entire movie.

[Danny] And a lot of the techniques or visuals

that came from how the comic books were printed,

we wanted to stay away from anything that was soft,

or did not look like it belonged in the illustrated world.

That included motion blur, that includes the camera focus.

One of the great things about this movie,

because it all feels like it's printed in ink,

means that you could stop on absolutely every frame

and it's all clear.

You can understand where it's coming from and going to.

It looks like an illustration on every frozen frame.

[Sunflower by Post Malone and Swae Lee]

[Joshua] This very first shot of Miles, I love,

because we got to do this one at the very,

very end of the movie.

We did that one specifically so late

because the song was being written while we were making it,

so we actually started animating before the song

he's singing to was finished.

♪ Oooooh certain things you just can't refuse ♪

See you Friday!

Okay Mami, hasta luego!

Hey what's up?

How you doin'?

[Joshua] Motif wise, the goal for this scene,

is to make him feel as in his element as possible,

that he's in his neighborhood.

He loves this place and he's comfortable there.

[Danny] It's a very inviting place.

So the palate, the lighting, it's a comfortable, safe space.

And this starts to get contrasted as we go to his school,

where the lighting starts to get a little harsher,

and we kinda leave some of the comfort of his environment.

[class bell rings and background noises intensify]

[Voice From Movie Playing] Countless other possibilities.

There could be--

[Danny] New York is an iconic part of the movie.

[Joshua] Yeah, and we'd really drilled into trying

to treat New York the way only animation can.

Treat it like it's a character.

And not just the whole city of New York,

but the boroughs itself,

we treated like different characters.

Manhattan was this exaggeration of scale

and light and brightness.

[Danny] The shot where Miles is leaping off the building--

[Mile's Thoughts] That all it is Miles.

A leap of faith.

[Danny] It has an illustrated feel to it,

and it starts with these models that, on their own,

kinda look broken.

All the building are portions that don't make sense

for New York, and they're skewed in a way--

[Joshua] The buildings were miles long.

[Danny] They were, Yeah.

We had buildings that were maybe eight to ten times

taller than they should be for New York in shots.

They're also weirdly composed so that,

when you see it from the shot camera,

it all looks really, I mean it looks really cool.

If you pull from the siding, you view it

through a witness camera, you can see that,

not only are the buildings very strange proportions,

but the layout is really messed up.

It's really weird, broken looking.

But from the camera, its an amazingly powerful shot.

What you're seeing here is a test environment.

Some people might look at the train,

some people might look at Miles.

You're seeing the color shift in and out of registration.

The way that the colors might be misprinted

if they weren't lined up properly.

So it definitely puts one area in focus,

but the same time it still avoids that lens feel,

or the softness.

[Joshua] So this sequence we called Sitting Back There.

It's really the first time we see Miles and his dad

really interacting in the movie.

That first shot of this run,

where they're rounding the corner in front of that TV screen

is a great example of offsetting the characters

in the foreground so you can pay attention to the screen

in focus.

This one test shot, one of the key things

we really discovered from it, was how much we could

deconstruct level and detail at a distance.

If you look really closely, all of the traffic in this image

behind that one passing lane is all just simple color blobs.

And those simple color blobs represent a full city

and it was a great ah-ha moment for the entire team

that we weren't gonna populate it with 1,000 cars

and full of every single light in there.

[Danny] We took that idea and we applied it

to a lot in the movie, including every interior.

[Joshua] And it's a great example of handling

level of detail in a way we hadn't traditionally.

I didn't have to have the team animate hundreds

and hundreds of cars, and characters,

populate every building with people,

and just get that reduced later.

It was color blobs.

And then we were looking for opportunities

to make things simpler in animation

all throughout the movie.

Sometimes, even we'd have characters holding flashlights

and if you didn't see them, we didn't animate them.

[engines revving and bus honking]

That concept became the starting ground for another test.

If you notice really closely on the bus

that's crossing the scene, it's actually just

a deconstructed painting.

There's not 40 characters all sitting within that bus.

[Danny] We're also introducing pop frames in it,

where it's just hand drawn and it's really simple,

and it could be, basically,

taken out of a simple comic.

We're starting to realize that we have an opportunity here

to create a new visual language.

Personal chauffer going once.

It's okay!

[Mami speaking in spanish]

[Joshua] Line work is one of those things we had

to solve a lot of different ways.

It's amazing how much one little line

for a furrow or a dimple can make you feel

completely different about the expression.

Form lines describe the shape of something.

A thing like a nose.

The effects team did this amazing thing

where we had the character designer make a library

of drawings and that was something we could make rules for.

This is the way that nose would

look from this head angle to camera.

And we made a whole bunch of poses that defined that,

and the effects team would recreate those in 3D space,

with those rules of head angle to camera,

and then let the machine learning program

try and guess where those drawings would go,

and a person would correct it every time it was wrong,

making therefore another rule, and little by little,

we're teaching the computer to make drawings

that we find redundant.

So like an example,

where Miles is scrunching his face right there.

Usually with a character like this you'd have

to be wrinkling the model in order

to get this sort of crease.

It would never be as satisfying as a simple stroke.

You can just have the stroke on top of it,

and it's far more expressive and we understand it.

It's more clear.

[Danny] All that technology was in the service of allowing

artists more freedom to do things by hand

and it all became a part of this hand-crafted feel.

[Miles' Dad] Ya know, with great ability

comes great accountability!

That's not even how the saying goes, dad.

Yeah I do like his cereal, though.

I mean, I'll give him that.

[Joshua] Early on, we realized that animating on twos

was gonna be a great solution for a couple of reasons.

If you just watch it at speed,

you're just immersed in the movie,

you're not noticing all these things.

They're really sneakily hidden in there.

But if you pause and slow down the same footage,

you'll see only every other frame Miles is animated.

That's where we're describing as on twos.

You get that nice crispness, that pop-art feel

we're lookin' for.

Almost every shot in the movie, the cameras are on ones,

so we had to come up with all kinds of different

technical solutions for how to make our performances

with our characters on twos work with different styles

of camera always on ones.

Aah

Oh, oh!

[snow crashes]

[stick hits head]

Uh oh!

[Joshua] So if we just look at one scene from the movie,

this one of Miles running through the forest,

you can see he's going in and out of sync with the camera,

with the cameras moving at high speed through this

hand-held ones, through an entire forest.

With Peter and Miles, they're both usually animated on twos,

but we're going in and out of sync with them,

just so you're getting that sort of feeling

of they're not quite on the same page.

The real goal with this section is to make Miles

feel like he's getting it.

Oh, yow!

[Joshua] Miles is not quite in his element.

He hasn't learned to be a hero yet,

he hasn't figured out how to web swing.

Look where you want it to hit!

[Joshua] He starts really outta sync with Peter.

Peter being in his mastery and this being his comfort zone,

and it isn't a big deal for him.

Thwip and release.

[Joshua] So the beautiful thing about this sequence

is we're literally seeing the two of them

get on the same page.

They start more out of sync, and little by little,

get into sync with each other.

And they're even on different frame rates,

until they both get it together.

And because it's animated on twos,

we get to clarify that sort of posing and thwipping.

Peter doing that iconic low center of gravity Spidey poses,

and Miles, little by little,

gets to get there by the end of.

And then you see them make eye contact,

and bond over that experience.

[Danny] And then you can see Peter glitch here.

He's not supposed to be this Spider-Verse.

And so all the super heroes that come through

this Spider-Verse from theirs,

they struggle with this dimensional glitching.

Hey guys.

[Peter] Okay, who are you?

I'm Gwen Stacy.

Come on!

How many Spider People are there?

[Joshua] So we had to bring in each of the

Spider People from different universes,

and make them as different as possible,

while still standing next to each other,

and looking like they looked good next to each other.

There was the perfect, handsome Spidey.

The goal with him was how perfect of a hero

could we make him,

that was going to be a great role model for Miles,

and then take him away.

[Danny] And we replace him with Peter B Parker,

or Burrito Peter.

This fry is your universe.

It's soggy, it's weird, it's gross.

[Danny] He's no longer in his prime.

He maybe should be retired by now.

[Joshua] He's lost a few more fights.

[Danny] He's lost a lot more fights.

He's a reluctant mentor.

You have money right?

I'm not very liquid right now.

I think you're going to be a bad teacher.

[Danny] And there's Gwen Stacy.

Wanda?

It's Gwen, actually.

[Joshua] Gwen Stacy is, of all of the Spider People,

the hero prime.

She is the most capable, and adept and in charge.

But she's also probably had the most recent trauma.

So she has a little bit more of an emotional wall.

[Danny] Spider Noir.

Hey fellas!

[Danny] He looks black-and-white, even in our world.

He never does get any color.

He has the best one-liners.

Wherever I go, the wind follows.

And the wind, it smells like rain.

[Joshua] Penny Parker.

Hi guys!

[speaking in Japanese]

[Joshua] Penny Parker was the only Spider Person

that doesn't have super powers of her own,

and she has a mental telekinetic relationship

with a spider that runs her robot named S-P-D-R

that her father created.

This could literally not get any weirder.

[Danny] Spider Ham.

Wacky Spider Ham.

[Joshua] Yeah, he's the most who we're trying

to be in our cartoon aesthetic.

Really trying to make him feel as hand-drawn as possible.

[Danny] He's hot a giant hammer

that he pulls out of his pocket.

My name is Peter Porker.

Characters like Miles, Peter and Gwen,

they all came from the same physical universe,

where like the laws of reality are all

some-what similar.

And more extreme characters like Ham and Noir,

and especially Penny Parker, we got to push them,

like how differently could we make them.

That all you got?

[Danny] The final battle, the wheels fall off.

We've turned everything to 11.

Everything is going nuts.

So we have this abstract world,

kind of inspired by Kirby Dots.

The Kirby Dots are not just an aesthetic thing,

they're a nod to to the Collider Beam,

which is a particle beam.

And depending on what's happening,

and which characters are important,

the palate is shifting based on the colors

and the worlds of, or the Spider-Verse colors

of those characters.

[semi-truck honking]

And then when you get to the most emotional part,

where it's just Miles and King Pin.

Ya know, this is the final moments of the final battle.

You lose all colors, it's black.

The Kirby Dots are now just volumes of nothing.

[Joshua] Enveloping them.

[Danny] Yeah, enveloping them.

And it becomes, really, just about them.

And it also sets up incredibly beautifully,

the contrast of when Miles finally uses his super power,

with the touch.

[electrical shock]

[dramatic music]

[Danny] You have now established this black background

for this beautiful strike of his.

[whirring]

[beeping]

[explosion]

[drums play]

[Danny] This was a special project.

There's not very many times where you really get

to do something new.

[Joshua] It had to be bold.

It had to be different.

And that was the demand the audience put on us,

before we even started.

[Danny] Really, everybody held hands

from the very beginning, to try to do something special,

and to try to push animation somewhere

where it hadn't been before.

[music crescendos]

[heavy breathing]

[laughs]

[themed techno music]